Adam Tank

Adam Tank did not set out to sell software to engineers. He started as a microbiologist, spent some time in the food industry running quality and sanitation for General Mills, and figured out fairly quickly that he hated the lab. A grad-school internship at GE Water pulled him into the water sector, and in his own words it is a hard place to leave, because of the people. From GE he went to Suez as its North America smart-cities director, then to a small wastewater-treatment firm called Organica Water, and it was there that the idea behind Transcend was sitting in plain sight: Organica spent hundreds of engineering hours putting together design bids for treatment plants, and most of that work could be automated.

Adam Tank co-founded Transcend in 2019 to do exactly that. The company's product, the Transcend Design Generator, takes a few inputs about a water or wastewater plant and automatically produces the early-stage engineering that used to take a team weeks: the P&IDs (the piping and instrumentation diagrams that are an engineer's blueprint), the 3D and BIM models, and the CAPEX and OPEX numbers a utility or contractor needs to bid a job. Adam likes to call himself an engineering therapist, because a lot of his job is helping engineers make peace with the fact that software is now genuinely good at the spreadsheet-and-drafting work they have done for decades.

Adam Tank's bigger argument, though, is about water's image problem, and it is the thread that runs through everything he does. His view is that the industry is terrible at selling itself, that it takes a Flint or a burst pipe or a Texas freeze to get water into the public conversation at all, and that this is both a shame and completely avoidable. That belief is why he co-hosts the "Water We Talking About?" podcast with Jim Lauria of Mazzei Injector, a show built around water storytelling, and it is the same instinct that made the Autodesk news land so hard with him.

Adam Tank's favourite proof that the market is finally paying attention is a billion-dollar one. When Autodesk paid $1 billion for the water-software firm Innovyze in 2021 (the biggest acquisition in Autodesk's history at the time), he read it as a signal that water is a digital growth business, not the sleepy commodity sector it is often taken for. The signal got personal two years later, because Autodesk went on to lead Transcend's $20 million Series B in 2023, the largest of the four rounds that have taken the company to $33 million raised. For a founder whose whole pitch is that water deserves more attention and more capital, having the company that wrote the billion-dollar cheque then back his own business is about as on-brand as it gets.

“We shouldn't have to wait for pipes to explode for people to talk about us. We shouldn't have to wait for situations like Flint, Michigan to happen for people to talk about the need for investment in our sector.”

Adam Tank is, in the end, the rare water founder who treats the industry's quietness as the problem worth solving, which is why he spends his days automating the engineering nobody wants to do and his evenings arguing that water finally has a story worth telling.