Jacob Bossaer

Jacob Bossaer got into water almost by accident, and he is the first to admit it. He graduated as a chemical engineer from Ghent University in 2011, but a year earlier he had applied to be a water expedition engineer in Antarctica, not because he knew anything about water (he openly says he bluffed the interview) but because he wanted to go to Antarctica. He missed the spot, signed with Dow Chemical, then got a last-minute call back when the other candidate dropped out. So his first real job was running the water system at the Princess Elisabeth station, the Belgian Antarctic base that operates entirely on renewable energy. The installation had never properly worked before, and as he puts it, it started working partly because he did not know it was supposed to be impossible.

Jacob Bossaer went back to Antarctica four more summers, the last time as expedition leader sent by the Belgian government to untangle a political fight over the station. That fight is what pushed him out: he decided it was not his war, and that he wanted to make a real difference instead. The technical lesson he carried home is the whole idea behind BOSAQ. If you can recycle and produce drinking water in one of the most extreme environments on the planet, running only on renewable energy, you can do it anywhere. In 2017 he founded BOSAQ with his friend Pieter Derboven, a PhD chemical engineer, after deciding from his own business plan that he was, in his words, not the technical Einstein and needed someone smarter beside him.

Jacob Bossaer built BOSAQ around a product the company calls Q-Drop: a containerised drinking-water plant that runs 100% off-grid and 100% without anyone on site, because its biggest contracts sit in the middle of the Suriname jungle where you cannot send an engineer from Belgium when something breaks. Every unit is connected over internet, cell or satellite so the team can watch and run it from a distance, and three years of maintenance and local-engineer training are written into every contract. The systems are modular, which Jacob compares to buying a car with options: a standard machine, plus a module to pull mercury out of the water in a gold-mining region, or a solar pack, or a hydro pack. The aim is the lowest total cost of ownership in the market, or as he likes to say, to be the Porsche of drinking-water installations.

Jacob Bossaer sells something most water companies do not, and it is the most interesting thing about him: he sells a mindset to governments rather than a machine. Water, he argues, was historically left to either the state or to NGOs, and he points to Rwanda, where ten different NGOs once dropped ten incompatible water systems into ten villages, one failed, nobody could fix it, and the whole thing fell over. BOSAQ instead uses the government rather than bypassing it, pairing private delivery with public ownership, and it obliges those governments to make people pay for the water, because the moment people pay, the water has value and they look after it. He calls his own philosophy social capitalism, the belief that basics like drinking water should be publicly owned but privately run, and he is candid that in three and a half years the company came close to bankruptcy three times because it kept investing ahead of its own growth.

Jacob Bossaer frames all of this as impact first and money second, which sounds like a founder line until you look at how BOSAQ is wired. The company gives 10% of its profit to a foundation called Water Heroes, and that 10% is written into the shareholder agreement so investors cannot vote it away, a rule he says weeds out the wrong investors before they get in. One of seven siblings raised by parents who told them to give something back, he is open that he started the company to make a dent in the 2.2 billion people without reliable clean water, not to get rich, though he insists he is not afraid of earning money because growth is what buys more impact. And he dreams big enough to be quotable about it.

“I was thinking if you can recycle water ... in one of the most extreme environments in the world, you can do it anywhere. And that's how the idea evolved to BOSAQ.”

Jacob Bossaer will also tell you, without blinking, that his real dream is to be the first person to put a drinking-water installation on Mars, because his mum always told him to dream, and he kept dreaming.