# Why Specialist Water Funds Are Finally Emerging: The Cycle H2O Bet

Here is a number that should bother any investor: by 2050, roughly a third of the world’s economy, on the order of $70 trillion, is on track to be exposed to serious water stress. A planet that cannot run without water. And yet, for every $1,000 that venture capitalists put into startups, only about one dollar reaches it. The whole sector has produced exactly one unicorn. That is the asymmetry: enormous dependence, rounding-error funding. So it is worth asking why a man who spent thirty years helping General Electric turn renewable energy from a tree-hugger curiosity into a multi-billion-dollar business just bet his next act on water. His name is Simon Olivier, and the fund is Cycle H2O, a C$30-million Quebec water fund co-managed by cleantech investor Cycle Capital and water-equipment group H2O Innovation. In its first months it wrote three cheques. Here is what that bet reveals.

Why does water get only $1 of every $1,000 in venture capital?

Start with the scale of what is at stake. The World Resources Institute reckons that by 2050, around 31% of global GDP, some $70 trillion of economic activity, will be exposed to high water stress, up from 24% in 2010. Water is not a niche; it quietly underwrites about a third of the economy. Now look at what flows back. Because I am fun at parties, I once summed up what Global Water Intelligence publishes every year about money going into water startups: $325 million in 2020, $470 million in 2021, $650 million in 2022. Real growth, until you set it against global venture capital over the same years ($345 billion, $681 billion, $445 billion) and watch water’s share crawl from 0.09% to 0.14%. Round it however you like: roughly one venture dollar in a thousand reaches water, to protect a third of the world’s economy.

That is the asymmetric bet in one breath. And the whole sector has produced exactly one unicorn, Gradiant, which my Leviathan database now clocks at a US$2 billion valuation after its May 2026 Series E. One. In a sector the planet depends on. When the gap between how much something matters and how much capital chases it gets this wide, an investor’s instinct should not be “stay away,” it should be “why, and for how long?”

Venture capital is money invested in young, unproven companies in exchange for equity, betting that a few big winners pay for the many that fail. A unicorn is a startup valued above $1 billion before it goes public. Water has produced exactly one: Gradiant.

The picture has improved at the top line lately. Cleantech Group still measures water at under 1% of all early-stage cleantech investment, but separate PitchBook figures (via Earth Capital) put 2023 at a record US$863.9 million before 2024 settled around US$768.2 million. So the pool is bigger than it was when I first ran my numbers. It is still a puddle next to what depends on it. And that puddle is exactly where Simon Olivier decided to go swimming.

A 30-year energy bet, now placed on water

To understand the bet, you have to understand where Simon comes from, because his whole thesis is a pattern he has watched play out once already. He spent three decades at General Electric, most of it building the renewable energy business in North America back when, as he puts it, “our only friends were some tree huggers” and nobody on Wall Street would pick up the phone. That business is now worth billions. He thinks water is sitting where renewables sat 25 years ago, with one telling difference that he keeps coming back to.

That line is the hook of the whole episode. In energy, GE spent billions chasing substitutes: wind and solar to replace coal, gas and oil. In water, there is no substitute. There is no Plan B molecule. Which means, in Simon’s reading, the stakes are higher (get it wrong and there is no backup) but the eventual prize is bigger, because water quietly fuels more of the industrial economy than oil and gas do. It is the kind of reframing that only lands if you have watched an unfashionable sector become fashionable before. He has.

The water-energy nexus is the tight coupling between the two: it takes energy to move and treat water, and water to produce energy. Expertise in one increasingly transfers to the other.

Inside Cycle H2O’s three-headed, de-risking structure

Here is the mechanics, because the structure is the actual innovation. Cycle H2O is a C$30-million fund that writes first cheques of roughly C$0.5 to 3 million, aiming to back at least twelve companies inside its first four years, chosen from a pipeline Simon says runs to about 400 names. The fund held its initial close in June 2024, anchored by Investissement Quebec. None of that is unusual. What is unusual is who sits at the table.

Cycle H2O has three partners, and that is the point. Cycle Capital is the largest Canadian cleantech venture firm, bringing the money and the track record of running an early-stage fund. H2O Innovation, a water group operating in around 75 countries (and the subject of its own 25-year acquisition story I unpacked here), brings something money cannot: market intelligence. When a deal lands, H2O Innovation can tell the fund “this is a good deal” or, just as valuable, “this is not as good a deal as you think it is.” Then, once the cheque clears, it opens doors and helps the startup skip the queue.

To de-risk an investment is to deliberately lower the chance it fails, here by buying in expert eyes on the technology and a built-in route to customers. A fund’s first cheque (or ticket size) is the amount it puts into a company’s early round; follow-on money is what it keeps in reserve to reinvest later.

Simon calls this his moat, and he is planning to keep it for Funds 2 and 3. He is also clear about what the fund is not: it will not touch infrastructure plays, which are too capital-intensive and too slow. The bet is on technology, hardware and software, at the earliest stage where, in his words, “there is more impact for investment” even though it is “the most risky space to be in.”

Where did Cycle H2O place its first bets?

This is the part no one else has, so let me lay it out plainly. Pull the disclosed rounds from my Leviathan database and you see exactly where Cycle H2O’s first money went: three Quebec startups, each solving a “market fundamental” rather than chasing a regulation.

Take the first one. Cycle H2O co-led a C$2.5-million round (about US$1.75 million) into BioAlert Solutions, which makes an on-site sensor that detects Legionella in water in three or four hours instead of the weeks a lab takes. The timing makes his case for him: the week before we recorded, New York City had a Legionella outbreak that hospitalized over 100 people and killed five, and London, Ontario had another that killed two. “Right now the phone of Bio Alert is ringing off the hook,” he said. A “nice to have” turning into a “need to have.” The second cheque went to RegenEAU, which pulls heat back out of the water draining from showers and laundry to pre-heat the incoming supply, and which just signed a commercial deal with Engie in Paris to crack the European market. The third, into Ecofilter Tek, backs regenerable resins that capture PFAS, the “forever chemicals” other founders are racing to destroy, without creating hazardous waste.

Syndicate is the group of investors who fund a round together; the lead (or co-lead) sets the terms and writes the biggest cheque while the others follow. A round is oversubscribed when more money wants in than the company is raising.

One honest note, because I keep my own database honest. The disclosed paperwork shows three Cycle H2O cheques. On the show, the count creeps to four investments in four companies inside six months, and Simon himself refers at one point to “two initial investments” that came in oversubscribed. The fourth is referenced but not publicly disclosed, so I am naming the three I can stand behind and flagging the rest. The shape of the bet is what matters: detection, water-energy efficiency, contaminant removal, all early, all local, all syndicated.

How do you value a water startup without getting burned?

If you have never priced a startup, this is where it gets interesting, because valuation is where good intentions go to die. Simon’s method has a name: the Goldilocks valuation. The fair number, he says, is the one where “the entrepreneur is not happy and we’re not happy” at the same time. To find it, the team maps two or three future funding rounds against a likely exit five years out, then works backwards to today’s price.

The reason to bother is defensive. Price a company too high today and you set it up for a down round later, and that is the thing every founder should fear. Simon is watching it happen across water right now: the PFAS category, he notes, is so hyped that valuations are inflating, and post-COVID multiples that “were through the roof” are correcting into bridge and down rounds. Mapping the exit first is how he avoids handing a founder a number that feels great in year one and dilutive in year three. It is also, he admits, a sneaky relationship test: how you argue about valuation tells you how you will argue about everything else. If you want the cautionary tale of how rare water exits actually are, I went down the rabbit hole of 600 water bets and almost no exits here.

A down round is a new funding round priced below the previous one, which punishes early backers and staff. It is dilutive because existing shareholders own a smaller slice afterwards. A bridge round is emergency money raised between proper rounds, usually a warning sign. An exit is how investors finally cash out, by acquisition or IPO.

Can water actually deliver venture returns, and how long does it take?

Now the bear case, stated plainly: time. Water has a reputation for taking forever, and Simon does not dodge it. The whole return, he says, hinges on the clock: “if it takes them 10 years … our return won’t be that great. But if we can do that over a shorter period of time, call it 4 or 5 years, our returns will probably exceed any of the other asset class return.” So is the 12-to-16-year reputation real? Sort of. A Wageningen University study by Paul O’Callaghan, which I keep coming back to, clocked the journey from innovation to mainstream at about 14 years for a technology that wins on value alone.

But here is the hopeful half of that same study, and it is exactly Simon’s strategy in disguise. When a crisis or a regulation forces adoption, the cycle roughly halves, to about seven years. That is why a Legionella sensor whose phone rings off the hook after an outbreak is a smarter bet than a clever gadget nobody urgently needs: the crisis compresses the timeline. Simon frames the broader arc the way he saw it in energy, where “when we first started, our only friends were tree huggers” and now billions pour in. He thinks the same maturing is coming to water on a five-to-ten-year horizon, “driven by more exits.” Which is the catch-22 of the whole sector, and why the early funds matter: you need exits to attract money, and money to create exits. (For the running tally of where that money actually is, I keep a state-of-water-funding scoreboard here.)

What earns a cheque, and what earns a quick no

If you are a founder reading this, here is the cheat sheet. The fast no comes when a company has no defensible barriers to entry (Simon puts patents and IP squarely in that box), when it is a me-too product with no real differentiation, or when there is no clear road to making money. Tick all three the wrong way and it is, in his words, “a clear no.” The fast yes tends to go to founders Cycle H2O already knows, often for years, through the ecosystem it built. BioAlert came up through Cycle Capital’s own accelerator before it ever got a cheque.

The most counterintuitive thing he said is about the order of money. Asked how a water startup should fund itself, he ranks grants and other non-dilutive money first (you give up no ownership for it), then profitability, and only then venture capital. Coming from a VC, that is refreshingly honest. And when Cycle does write the cheque, it almost never goes alone: it builds a syndicate of co-investors, and its first rounds came in oversubscribed, which Simon reads as a quiet signal that there is money on the sidelines waiting for someone who knows the sector to lead.

Non-dilutive funding is money (grants, government programs, revenue) that does not cost you equity. Barriers to entry are what stop a competitor from copying you tomorrow, the patents and hard-won IP that make a “moat.”

Why are specialist water funds finally emerging?

Step back and Cycle H2O stops looking like a one-off and starts looking like a pattern. Asked who else is in the water, Simon reels off the names without hesitating: Burnt Island Ventures, PureTerra, Emerald, HG Ventures, Mazarine, Echo River, plus a wave of generalist funds now hiring water expertise specifically to de-risk their own decisions.

A specialist fund invests only in one sector (here, water) and competes on depth; a generalist fund spreads across many and competes on reach. The thesis of this episode is that water has finally grown deep enough to reward specialists.

The numbers back the pattern. Burnt Island raised an oversubscribed US$30-million Fund I and is reportedly out raising US$50 million for Fund II; PureTerra is targeting around €80 million. And a generalist climate house like Cycle Capital, which runs seven funds, deliberately spinning up a dedicated water vehicle is the same signal from the other direction. (I sorted the whole zoo of who-invests-in-water into three tribes in my newsletter, if you want the field guide.) The honest truth is that a lot of these funds exist because the rest of us could not even find the deals: I got tired of stitching together Crunchbase, overpriced reports and a guy who knows a guy, so I built the water-deal map into my Leviathan database. When the plumbing for finding and pricing water deals finally exists, the specialists can show up. They are showing up.

Frequently asked questions

Why don’t VCs invest in water?

Historically, only about one venture dollar in a thousand reached water, against a reputation for slow, decade-plus adoption, and the sector has produced just one unicorn (Gradiant, valued around US$2 billion). Cleantech Group still measures water at under 1% of early-stage cleantech investment, though the absolute totals are now at record levels. The gap between water’s economic importance and the capital it attracts is the whole story.

Is water a good venture-capital investment?

Simon Olivier’s case is that water is an undervalued, finite resource whose price can only rise, and that returns hinge on time-to-scale: back the right company and reach an exit in four or five years and the returns can beat any other asset class.

What is Cycle H2O?

A C$30-million Quebec-based water venture fund, co-managed by Cycle Capital and H2O Innovation and led by Simon Olivier, writing first cheques of roughly C$0.5 to 3 million into early-stage water technology companies.

How does Cycle H2O de-risk early-stage water deals?

Through a three-partner structure (a cleantech VC, a global water group for market intelligence, and the fund team) plus a habit of only backing founders it already knows and building a co-investor syndicate around each deal.

How long does water technology take to scale?

Research by Paul O’Callaghan puts value-driven water technologies at about 14 years to reach mainstream adoption, dropping to roughly 7 when a crisis or regulation forces the issue.

How do investors value an early-stage water startup?

Cycle H2O uses a “Goldilocks valuation,” mapping two or three future rounds against a likely five-year exit and working backwards, specifically to avoid the down rounds that punish everyone later.

The bet, paid forward

If water really is sitting where energy sat 25 years ago, unfashionable, substitute-free and slow, then the funds writing the awkward first cheques today, into a Legionella sensor, a shower-drain heat exchanger, a PFAS resin, are the ones that will look obvious in hindsight. Simon Olivier has watched a sector go from tree-huggers to billions once before, and he is betting his second act that water is next. The interesting question is not whether water VC stays at one dollar in a thousand. It is who is positioned for the moment it does not.

Listen to the full conversation with Simon Olivier on (don’t) Waste Water, S13E19. And if you want the water-investing field notes between episodes, my newsletter is here.

Sources

1. Economic exposure to water (~$70T / 31% of global GDP by 2050, from 24% in 2010): World Resources Institute (WRI Aqueduct), “25 Countries… Face Extremely High Water Stress,” wri.org/insights/highest-water-stressed-countries (2023). Retrieved 2026-06-28.
2. Water VC share / “1 in 1,000”: Global Water Intelligence annual venture tallies ($325M 2020, $470M 2021, $650M 2022; 0.09%->0.14%), as compiled by Antoine Walter / Leviathan (first-party). Retrieved 2026-06-28.
3. Gradiant = water’s one unicorn, ~US$2B valuation at its May 2026 Series E (and Series D May 2023): Leviathan, my water funding database (funding_rounds), verified 2026-06-28; Series E valuation per founders’ interview (raise amount undisclosed).
4. Water <1% of cleantech early-stage: Cleantech Group, "The State of the Water Sector," cleantech.com/the-state-of-the-water-sector/ (2025). Retrieved 2026-06-28.
5. Water VC record totals: PitchBook via Earth Capital, “Water Tech 2025: Innovation Meets Urgency,” earthcapital.net/water-tech-2025-innovation-meets-urgency/ ($863.9M 2023; $768.2M 2024). Retrieved 2026-06-28.
6. Adoption ~14 yr / ~7 yr: P. O’Callaghan et al., “Analysis of adoption rates for Needs Driven versus Value Driven innovation water technologies,” Water Environment Research (2019), DOI 10.1002/wer.1013. Retrieved 2026-06-28.
7. Cycle H2O fund (C$30M, C$0.5-3M tickets, June 2024 close, Investissement Quebec anchor): Cycle Capital press release, cyclecapital.com/en/2024/06/26/cycle-h2o-holds-initial-close-… (2024). Retrieved 2026-06-28.
8. BioAlert C$2.5M co-led GreenSky + Cycle H2O (Mar 2025): BetaKit, betakit.com/bioalert-secures-2-5-million-… (2025). Retrieved 2026-06-28.
9. Cycle H2O / Cycle Capital portfolio rounds (BioAlert, RegenEAU, Ecofilter Tek, Fibracast): Leviathan, my water funding database (funding_rounds), verified 2026-06-28.
10. Peer fund sizes (Burnt Island $30M->$50M, PureTerra €80M): public reporting, retrieved 2026-06-28.

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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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Related: Simon Olivier walked me through Cycle H2O’s de-risking playbook for early-stage water

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