Ari Raivetz

Ari Raivetz did not take the obvious route into water. He started in enterprise software in the late 1990s, working in ERP and supply-chain systems, which is the unglamorous software that runs a company's inner plumbing, and that is where he learned the one idea his whole career hangs on: break a business into its processes, automate the repetitive ones, and let the people spend their time on the work that actually needs a human. After an MBA at the Yale School of Management, he went to Wall Street as an equity analyst at Bank of America, where, in his own words, his coverage universe was "pretty much anybody who is destroying the natural world," the oil and gas companies fracking for shale, the refiners, the industrial manufacturers. So once he had paid off his student loans, he decided he also had a debt to pay back to the planet.

Ari Raivetz paid that debt by moving into clean-tech investing, running the water private-equity investments at a pioneering fund called RNK Capital. One of those investments was a quirky Hungarian company called Organica Water, which builds wastewater plants that look like botanical gardens, and after three years on the outside as an investor, the founders asked him to do something most investors never do: quit his job, pack up his family and move to Budapest to run the company. He did, and that is where the real story starts, because once he was inside, he found the bottleneck that would become his life's work.

Ari Raivetz discovered that before Organica could even bid on a project, it had to do hundreds of hours of preliminary engineering, and then a client would ask for one change and the whole package had to be redone. A 15-person startup could not afford an army of engineers to keep redoing that work, so the team built a software tool to do the first slice of the design automatically. That tool is the Transcend Design Generator, and in 2019 Ari Raivetz spun it out of Organica as its own company, Transcend. The software takes the inputs an engineer normally gets from a client, how dirty the water is, how clean it needs to be, the flow rate and temperature, and runs the process, mechanical, electrical and civil engineering in the cloud with no human intervention, producing the drawings, the 3D and BIM models, the equipment list and the cost estimates in eight hours or less.

Ari Raivetz is blunt about why this matters, and it is not a small claim. He and his team have been around the water industry for fifteen years and his verdict on its pace of innovation is simply "it's awful, it's just really slow." His bet is that if you hand utilities and engineering firms more design options in less time, you change the economics of building water infrastructure, and the market has come round to that view: according to my Leviathan database, Transcend has raised $33 million, including a $20 million Series B in 2023 in which Autodesk, the company behind the design tools most engineers already live in, took a stake. For the firm whose software generates the BIM models, having the BIM giant on the cap table is a real vote of confidence rather than a press-release flourish.

Ari Raivetz keeps coming back to the same human point underneath all of it. The engineers who were "extremely skeptical" that a machine could ever do the first 20-30% of a design, he says, ended up loving the tool, because it took the monotonous, repetitive early-stage drawing off their plates and freed them to solve the hard problems that actually inspired them. And when you ask him why he is in this at all, the answer is not a market-size slide. He has two daughters, and on the show he was direct about it: "I think about what their life is going to be like, what their kids' life is going to be like. We have to change."

“The only thing that's certain about startups is that stuff is uncertain. But I do think that we are at the beginning of a transformation in the engineering and construction industry, because we've ignored climate change for way too long and now we have to act.”

Ari Raivetz is, in the end, a numbers man who went looking for a way to make a numbers-heavy industry faster, and decided the highest-leverage thing he could do for the planet was not to invent a new way to treat water, but to automate the boring first draft of every plant that does.