Adam Root

Adam Root did not come to water from water. He trained as a mechanical engineer at Kingston University, did a stint at GE, and then spent five years at Dyson, the British company famous for rethinking the vacuum cleaner, where his whole job was solving consumer-hardware problems. The turn came in 2017, when he sat in on conservation talks in Bristol and got stuck on one unglamorous question: where do the tiny plastic fibres our synthetic clothes shed in the wash actually end up? The answer, mostly, is the ocean, and Adam Root left Dyson to do something about it.

Adam Root founded Matter to capture, harvest and recycle microplastics, and the flagship product is the one you can picture: Gulp, a filter that retrofits onto a washing machine and traps up to 90% of the microfibres a load sheds. Underneath it is a filtration approach he describes as weaving a needle between three older methods. It does not burn a lot of energy like a cyclone, it does not need a throwaway membrane, and it does not dose chemicals like a coagulant, which is what lets it run with no disposable parts and about nine patents around the design. It is the kind of unglamorous water technology that only matters once it is built into something millions of people already own.

Adam Root runs Matter as what he calls "a brand behind brands," which is the part investors should sit up for. Rather than sell a Matter-branded box to the world, the company licenses its technology into other people's products, an Intel-Inside model for water, and the appliance giants Bosch and Siemens now build Matter's microplastic filter into washing machines sold across 30 European markets. That choice lets a roughly 40-person company punch at the scale of the multinationals it partners with, because they bring the supply chain and the factory floors while Matter brings the technology. It is a founder model worth studying for anyone watching the water builders space.

Adam Root is just as interested in the policy and the ocean as the hardware, and that is the conviction that makes him worth listening to. He frames plastic as a material that belongs to what he calls the technosphere, the things humans made that the natural world cannot break down, and his argument is that it should never have ended up in our water, our air or our food. He even welcomes competitors, on the logic that more players drive awareness, drive legislation, and ultimately drive the problem toward a fix. Regulation is now catching up: France and California are both phasing in rules that require microplastic filters on washing machines, which is exactly the wave Matter is built to ride.

Adam Root has spent the years since the episode proving the model travels beyond the laundry room. In 2025 Matter was named an Earthshot Prize finalist in the Revive Our Oceans category, and Inter IKEA Group stepped in to lead a new financing round to scale Regen, a self-cleaning filter aimed not at homes but at textile mills, where the fibres are shed in the first place. The goal Adam Root has set is blunt and measurable: install the technology in more than 400 factories and keep 15,000 tonnes of microfibre out of the ocean by 2030.

“There is an opportunity to build the next Google or Apple in hardware that is specifically based on solving environmental challenges.”

He is, at bottom, a product engineer who decided the most interesting product left to build was a cleaner ocean, and who is patient enough to do it as the quiet technology inside someone else's machine.