Noshaq

Noshaq is the investment arm of the Liège region, and that is the first thing to understand about it. It started in 1985 as Meusinvest, a fund built to reindustrialise a Belgian province whose steel and coal economy was fading, and it took the name Noshaq in 2019. Its job is to keep money and companies rooted in Wallonia, not to chase a single technology, which is why its portfolio runs past 460 companies across life sciences, industry, agrifood, energy and the digital economy.

Noshaq is not a water fund, and it has never claimed to be. Water turns up only where it crosses a sector the fund already backs, so the two water companies (don't) Waste Water tracks both arrived through a side door. Water here is a consequence of the agrifood and industrial briefs, not a thesis of its own. For a founder, that makes Noshaq a generalist regional door that happens to open onto water now and then.

Noshaq backed Toopi Organics, which collects human urine and turns it into farm biostimulants instead of letting it load up the sewers, a deal that sits naturally with Alain Balthazart's agrifood practice. It also backed Purecontrol, whose software trims the energy wastewater plants burn running their aeration tanks, the kind of industrial-efficiency play Dimitri Liquet's team looks for. Both are 2023 Series A rounds raised alongside other European backers.

Noshaq is the backer a water startup meets when its technology also answers an agricultural or industrial question a Walloon investor cares about, and it is a quiet sign of how regional development funds are picking up water as part of a wider climate and resource brief. It is a broad, patient, regional investor first, and a water backer only by extension.