PureTerra Ventures

PureTerra Ventures did not start in Amsterdam. It started in China, around 2017, where the two founders, Nic Pannekeet and Gijs De Bruin, had spent years building companies, including the exhibition business that grew into the water-tech group 98 Sparks. That is where the first cheques were written, in a place where the water problem is not something you read about in a report but something you live with daily. The Amsterdam office and the Clean Water for All line came afterwards.

What turned them from operators into investors was watching good water companies quietly die. As Gijs tells it on the show, one year a promising startup is there, the next it has bankrupted itself, not because the technology was wrong but because the funding, the sales, the commercial muscle never showed up. In water the founders tend to be scientists first and salespeople a distant second, so PureTerra was built to supply the half that goes missing.

So it does one thing, stubbornly. PureTerra invests in water, and only water, which is rarer than it sounds, because most funds that wave the climate flag spend the real money on energy and leave water as a polite slide near the end of the deck. What it backs splits three ways: industrial treatment and reuse, water efficiency on farms, and the software layer that tells a utility where its water is leaking away. First cheques run 1 to 5 million euros, into companies past the lab and ready to sell.

In early 2026 that focus earned a fresh vote of confidence. PureTerra went back to market for a second fund, targeting 150 million euros, with a 10 million cornerstone already committed by Invest-NL, the Dutch state's promotional bank, after a first fund that closed at 73 million euros and backed a dozen water companies from Seed to Series B. The bench has grown alongside the money, with Joost Notenboom joining as Venture Partner and water strategist Will Sarni as Strategic Partner. If you are new to water as a place to put capital, PureTerra is the clearest example I track of a firm treating it as an asset class in its own right, rather than a footnote inside an energy fund.