Henry Cordes

Henry Cordes did not start out in water, and he did not even start out in finance the obvious way. He read Classical Civilization at Yale, which is about as far from wastewater plants as a degree gets, then went into investment research, first at Albourne Partners where he spent years doing due diligence on infrastructure and real assets like energy, mining and timber, and earned his CFA charter (the Chartered Financial Analyst credential) along the way. He joined Sciens in 2016, and by 2020 he had become a Principal at Sciens Water, the firm's US water arm, where the whole job is finding water companies worth backing.

Henry Cordes makes an argument that sounds slightly heretical at first, which is that private capital belongs in water. In the US, water has long been treated as a public good, so any private investor in the sector gets looked at skeptically, and as he puts it, people "haven't properly valued water because it's been heavily subsidized." His view is that the money is genuinely needed and that bringing it in is good for everyone, because more capital means more of the big problems actually get solved. And the prize, in his framing, is large: "it's a hundred billion dollar industry in the US alone."

Henry Cordes and Sciens go after the deals that are too small for the giants. The big infrastructure funds will not look at anything below 100 or 200 million dollars, which leaves a whole layer of small, capital-starved utilities unloved, and that is exactly where Sciens plays. Their flagship example is Central States Water Resources, which buys up tiny privately-owned water and wastewater systems that need investment to even meet their regulatory requirements, then brings in the capital and the management to run them at scale. Central States has since grown into one of the fastest-growing investor-owned water utilities in the country.

Henry Cordes is careful not to oversell the "impact investor" label, because, as he says, it "can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people," but the measurable good is clearly what hooks him. He likes water precisely because the impact is countable: how much water goes in, what is in it, how many tons of ammonia you removed. The part that visibly moves him is seeing it firsthand, the broken treatment plant, the before-and-after in a small community, the stories you only hear when you actually own the asset. You can hear the full conversation in his (don't) Waste Water episode on whether private capital can change water for the better.

“People kind of know about the problems in the abstract, but when you are actually investing through a company like Central States, you see them firsthand. You can see literally the broken wastewater treatment plant, you can hear the actual stories within that small community, and you can see before or after. It's very clear that you're actually making a difference by improving this infrastructure.”

Henry Cordes is, in the end, the investor's version of an optimist: someone who looks at America's crumbling, mispriced water systems and sees not a tragedy to mourn but a market to fix, which, if he is right about that $100 billion, is the kind of optimism that gets things built.