Hiep Le

Hiep Le did not start in software. He spent close to three decades designing, commissioning and operating water treatment plants, the unglamorous engine room of the water industry, first with United Utilities Australia and Osmoflo, and then at Gradiant, where he ran process engineering and eventually became chief technology officer for the eastern region. So when he talks about teaching a computer to run a plant, he is not a coder guessing at water, he is a water engineer who knows exactly which judgement calls keep a plant from going wrong, and he is trying to bottle that. As he puts it, what he is doing is working himself out of a job, downloading his own experience into algorithms that do the work he would do, only a hundred times faster.

Hiep Le keeps coming back to one quiet problem that should worry the whole sector, which is that the people who actually know how to run plants are retiring. The grey-haired operators with the practical judgement of what could go wrong are leaving, and the younger engineers coming in do not have the same hard-won feel for it yet, so a lot of that knowledge simply walks out the door. Turing's pitch is to capture that operator knowledge as software before it disappears, then use AI to manage it for the long term, which is both a workforce answer and a quietly compelling reason for a young engineer to find water interesting again.

Turing itself is a spin-out story. Hiep Le started a product category called SmartOps inside Gradiant back in 2021 to take its operations-and-maintenance business toward AI-powered SCADA, the control software that runs industrial plants, and along the way Gradiant folded in a couple of digital startups, Synauta and SpaceAge Labs. The trouble was practical and very human: he was hiring data scientists and machine-learning engineers whose pay scales looked nothing like his chemical engineers, and it got hard to hold both kinds of company under one roof. So in 2023 the digital piece spun out as Turing, an independent company with Gradiant as a minority shareholder, free to compete (and even partner) across the industry rather than serve one parent.

Turing now sells across the whole water value chain, from IoT sensors you can drop into a sewer up to the AI platform that optimises a treatment plant, with two flagship products: TOP Clear for utilities and SmartOps AI for industrial operators. Its customers read like a who's who, from Xylem and water utilities buying the digitisation layer, to mining giants like BHP and Rio Tinto whose plants Gradiant runs remotely on Turing's software, and Singapore's water agency PUB, where Turing's algorithms predict when a membrane needs cleaning. The independence pitch is deliberate, and Hiep Le states it plainly: Turing is the software of choice, the AI platform these customers run on, whoever built the plant. It is one of the clearer bets in the wider water-tech shift from selling hardware to selling the intelligence that runs it.

Hiep Le arrived in Australia as a child, a refugee from Vietnam who came by boat, and the personal anchor under all of this is striking, because he traces his whole relationship with water back to that, to a belief that access to clean water is not just a necessity but a responsibility. He grew up in a country where water scarcity is a constant, trained as a chemical engineer in Adelaide, and is now based in Singapore building a company that wants to follow Gradiant's footsteps toward unicorn status over the next five to seven years. The $14 million Series A, led by Safar Partners in early 2025, is the market's first real bet that he can.

“I've got 28 years of experience in designing, commissioning, constructing and operating water treatment plants. So what I'm doing is actually working myself out of a job, downloading my experience, combining that with software and AI to do the work that I would do as an engineer, but do it 100 times faster.”

Hiep Le is, in short, the operator who decided to encode himself: a plant engineer betting that the surest way to fix water's looming knowledge gap is to teach the software what he already knows.