By my count, the fifth most active water tech investor on the planet is not a water fund. It is the venture arm of a 100-year-old, family-owned asphalt-and-quarries company from Indianapolis, and water is barely a fifth of what it does. HG Ventures has backed 12 water rounds across 7 companies in my Leviathan database, which puts it behind only Burnt Island Ventures, Echo River Capital, PureTerra Ventures and Emerald Technology Ventures, every one of them a dedicated water specialist. HG is the only corporate venture arm in that top five. And here is the part I can say that nobody else can: I have sat down with the founders of five of the seven companies HG backs. So let me show you the fund through the people I have actually interviewed.
Who are the most active water tech investors in 2026?
When I rank every investor in my Leviathan database by the number of water rounds they have joined, the order at the top is Burnt Island Ventures with 48, Echo River Capital with 23, PureTerra Ventures with 16, Emerald Technology Ventures with 15, and then HG Ventures with 12.
Deal count here just means the number of distinct rounds an investor has joined, which is the cleanest way I know to measure how active someone really is rather than how loud they are. I have had every one of those four specialists on the podcast, and to a fund they exist to do water and nothing else. Then there is HG, a corporate fund most people in water have never heard of, keeping their company while calling itself something else entirely. That is the puzzle, and it is worth taking apart.
What is corporate venture capital, and why does HG’s version work?
Corporate venture capital, or CVC, is venture investing run from inside an operating company instead of from a standalone fund. A normal fund raises money from outside backers, the limited partners, and has to hand it back with a profit on a clock that usually runs about ten years. A CVC invests the parent company’s own balance sheet, and the textbook knock on it is the four-year curse: most corporate venture arms get quietly shut down around year four, the moment the parent loses patience.
HG sidesteps that curse by structure, and Ginger Rothrock, who runs the fund as Managing Director, put it more plainly than I could.
“We don’t have a real fund. We’re a 100-year-old buy-and-hold family-owned industrial company, so we don’t have a weird incentive to exit under some certain circumstances. … Other investors are trying to force exits because they have to meet some arbitrary tenure guidelines. We don’t necessarily have to do that.”
So while a classic fund is counting down to the day it has to sell, whether or not selling is good for the company, HG can simply wait. No limited partners, no clock, no forced exit. (I made an unpopular but honest case about this kind of money once, if you want the argument in full.) When you are a century-old family business, patience is not a strategy you adopt, it is just who you are.
Why a fund this small still chases returns
There is a second objection, and Ginger raised it before I could. Plenty of corporate venture arms exist purely as strategic antennae, where the money barely matters against the parent’s core business. She is candid that HG is a different animal, and the reason is size. She pointed to a friend at Samsung’s venture arm who did a three million dollar deal, got 20x, and handed back sixty million, and Samsung, a company that ships phones and televisions by the container-load, barely noticed.
A strategic CVC like that is mostly motivated to help the parent sell more product. HG is small enough, in pure dollar terms, that the money it returns to The Heritage Group matters just as much as any strategic value, which is precisely why it behaves like a real investor rather than a corporate science project. That, more than anything, is why it out-deal-flows the funds around it.
Tourist or specialist? How 18% beats the funds that do nothing else
There is a fair objection here. If water is only 18% of HG’s thesis, how does it out-invest funds that do nothing else? When I analysed 1,425 water investors last year, I found that 86% of them put less than a tenth of their portfolio into water, and the median allocation was a thin 6.7%. In water tech, I wrote at the time, you are either a tourist or a specialist, and almost never a resident. (If you want the detailed maths on the three investor tribes hiding in that data, I dug into it on my newsletter – consider subscribing.)
By those numbers HG is a tourist, water a slice rather than the whole pie. The trick is that it behaves like a resident, and that has almost nothing to do with how much money it points at water and almost everything to do with the kind of money it is, and where it chooses to spend it.
From an incinerator to a water thesis
HG’s first water cheque was never meant to be a water strategy. It was a waste problem. The Heritage Group used to own and operate an incinerator through its environmental arm, and around 2019 Ginger’s team watched the PFAS-laden waste streams come in and simply not slow down. PFAS, the “forever chemicals” now turning up in drinking water across the world, were arriving by the truckload and were not going anywhere.
So they went looking for anyone working on the contaminant itself, and found exactly one company.
“We invest in [Puraffinity]. They were the only company in the whole world that we found working in PFAS at that time, which was super interesting. That was our first water investment. It was because of the contaminant.”
From that single waste-driven bet the thesis grew outward into industrial wastewater, water reuse, and zero liquid discharge, the extreme case where a plant recovers essentially all of its water and discharges almost nothing. (here is the economics pushing industrial water reuse) Three of HG’s seven water companies sit somewhere on the PFAS spectrum, which tells you the origin never really left.
HG’s water portfolio is, basically, my guest list
This is where I can do something no other write-up of HG can. Across those 12 rounds sit 7 companies and a little over 190 million dollars of total financing, and HG itself has deployed exactly 48,523,663 dollars into water, a figure I got confirmed straight from the firm, to the dollar, which is the kind of number no public database will hand you.
Five of those founders have sat across from me. Alex Rappaport built ZwitterCo around a membrane meant, in his words, to “solve the Achilles heel of filtration: fouling, clogging,” which is exactly the bottleneck that makes industrial water reuse so hard. Julie Bliss Mullen started Aclarity to destroy PFAS rather than just trap it, the way she had degraded other contaminants in her PhD: “they all could be degraded, and I did it electrochemically.” And Emily Hicks at FREDsense moved her field water test onto “a polymer based on a plant material that binds PFAS,” selective enough that, when it grabs the molecule, it releases a fluorescent dye she can simply measure.
The other two interviews show how wide HG’s idea of water actually runs. Megan Glover scaled 120Water, the one HG has since partly exited, on a sharp insight that the lead-in-water crisis is really a software problem: “the contaminant is lead, but at the root cause it’s a data management issue.” And back in 2020, Ari Raivetz told me that Transcend’s software “automates the first 20 to 30% of the engineering of a water or wastewater treatment facility,” cutting the grunt work out of plant design. Puraffinity’s PFAS media and ElectraMet’s metal recovery round out the seven. Patient money, pointed squarely at the unglamorous, regulated, industrial end of water.
What does HG offer a founder besides a cheque?
Notice what those five companies have in common beyond a logo on HG’s website: each one needs to prove a technology works on real, ugly, industrial water before a customer will trust it. That is exactly where a corporate parent stops being a handicap and becomes the product.
“We’re set up like a hybrid fund. We want to take the best of the corporate world, all the access […] the network we have, the R&D resources, the facilities, but also behave like a traditional VC where we can move fast, we can make decisions independently, and we’re looking for financial return.”
HG’s one-line thesis is to invest where The Heritage Group can help, then actually help. A pure financial VC can wire money and make introductions, but it does not own the quarries, the asphalt plants and the environmental operations where a young water technology can be tested on genuinely difficult streams. That access is the edge HG sells, and it is a large part of why it wins deals against funds with deeper pockets.
How do you pitch a water tech VC like this one?
Now the part founders most need to hear, because it runs against instinct. The person deciding whether to back you is a PhD chemist with The Heritage Group’s R&D labs down the hall, so you would expect her to lead with the technology. She puts it last.
“The entrepreneur themselves, can they tell a decent story? … storytelling is so important for entrepreneurs, either hiring folks […] raising money, getting customers. … How articulate are they in telling the story? Whether it’s tell me about your market, tell me why you started the company, tell me about your product.”
The single thing she sees founders get wrong is not knowing who their real competition is. And the kindest thing an investor like this can give you is speed, a point Simon Olivier of Cycle H2O made to me from the other side of the table: he would rather founders “come to us early or earlier,” and if they are not ready, send them off to coaching than leave them hanging. For a founder chasing a cheque, a fast no can be almost as useful as a slow yes, and on that front HG is unusually quick.
The same-day yes or no
That speed is not a figure of speech. HG runs all of its diligence in-house, with no outside consultants, and the front of the process is brutally quick. A first call lasts half an hour. Then the founder goes in front of the entire investment group for an hour, back and forth, and HG decides that same day whether it is going into diligence at all.
If the answer is yes, one partner becomes the diligence lead and chases down two or three go/no-go questions straight away: is the revenue real, does anyone actually care about this, and is it a fit for The Heritage Group. Only then does it open into the fuller process, which almost always includes a technical session with experts pulled from inside the group. For a founder, that combination, a fast verdict and a hundred years of industrial muscle behind a yes, is rare enough to be worth pitching for.
Is water actually a good long-term investment?
This is where the patient money starts to look less eccentric and more correct. The public market has been an unkind place for small water technology companies, and the real returns have been accruing quietly in private rounds instead. In my database, the early-stage cheques where investors like HG actually live, the pre-seed to Series A rounds, more than tripled, from 33 in 2018 to 109 in 2025.
That is a 3.3 times jump, and it comfortably outruns the broader market of all water rounds, which only doubled over the same stretch. So the demand for capital is real and growing fastest exactly at the stage HG plays. The open question is the exit: water has produced very few of them, and a fund on a ten-year clock has to sell whether or not a buyer has shown up. (the rare escape is how Gradiant became the first and only water tech unicorn)
This is where HG’s lack of a clock turns into a quiet superpower, and where it has already done something most water investors are still waiting to do: it booked an exit. When 120Water raised its 43-million-dollar Series B in early 2024, HG sold down its stake “with a good multiple,” as Ginger put it, rather than riding along. The reasoning was telling. 120Water is a municipal software company, and as she said, “we don’t do municipal, we don’t know a lot about the areas in which they operate, so part of it was just fit,” while her first fund needed to start returning money: “we need to get some exits. There was an opportunity to get some liquidity, so it worked. We still have some ownership.” That is the asymmetry in one move. HG never has to sell, so when it does, it is because the fit is wrong and the price is right, not because a clock ran out. It is the whole reason the most active investor on my list is the one under no pressure at all.
The one-word thesis
When I asked Ginger for her one-word thesis on water, the answer came back as “inevitable.” After nine years of out-deal-flowing funds that do nothing but water, that lands a good deal heavier than the bumper sticker it sounds like. The harder question is what happens when all these private bets finally need a way out, in a sector that has barely produced one, and that is the conversation Ginger and I have in full on the episode.
Frequently asked questions
Who are the biggest water tech investors in 2026?
By number of water rounds in my Leviathan database, the most active are Burnt Island Ventures, Echo River Capital, PureTerra Ventures, Emerald Technology Ventures, and HG Ventures. The first four are dedicated water funds. HG Ventures, the corporate venture arm of The Heritage Group, is the only corporate investor in the top five.
What is corporate venture capital (CVC)?
Corporate venture capital is venture investing run from inside an operating company rather than an independent fund. Because the parent is not on a limited-partner clock, a CVC like HG Ventures can hold a company for a decade or more without being forced to sell, which is why it can behave more patiently than a traditional fund.
How do you pitch a water tech VC?
Lead with the story, not the technology. HG Ventures screens first on whether a founder can explain the market, name their real competition, and tell a clear, articulate story. Founders who open with the technology tend to lose, and at HG the decision to enter due diligence can come the same day you present.
Is water a good long-term investment?
Water demand is structural, but the returns mostly sit in private markets rather than public ones, where small-cap water stocks have a long record of drifting down after their IPO. Early-stage private water rounds more than tripled between 2018 and 2025, which is where specialists and corporate venture arms like HG Ventures concentrate.
What are industrial water reuse and zero liquid discharge (ZLD)?
Industrial water reuse means treating a plant’s own wastewater on-site and recycling it back into the process. Zero liquid discharge is the extreme version, where essentially all of the water is recovered and almost nothing is discharged. Rising freshwater costs, tightening discharge rules, and corporate ESG targets are pushing both up the agenda.