Kimberly Nelson

Kimberly Nelson did not come to water through engineering or chemistry, she came to it through data, and she has been at it for a long time. She started in Pennsylvania state government, where she rose to Chief Information Officer and Executive Deputy Secretary of the state's Department of Environmental Protection, working on a question that turns out to be the whole story of her career: how does an agency spending billions of taxpayer dollars actually know whether it is making a difference to the environment? That question got her recruited to Washington, where she served as the Senate-confirmed Assistant Administrator and Chief Information Officer of the US EPA's Office of Environmental Information, a Presidential appointment, running the federal government's environmental data initiatives for five years.

Kimberly Nelson then spent 16 years at Microsoft, helping governments through their digital transformations, which she describes as a fabulous, once-in-a-lifetime job that never quite let her dig into the environmental questions she cared about most. So when three founders she had followed launched a water-intelligence startup called True Elements, the pull was hard to resist, and in 2022 she made what she calls the leap: leaving a company of 160,000 people for one of about a dozen. Her own framing of the gap is the most honest line in the interview, that even this little tiny company gets to sit across the table from some of the biggest companies in the world, because water has finally become that important.

Kimberly Nelson's job at True Elements is to make a term real that, by her own account, you would not have found defined anywhere a few years ago: Water Intelligence, the data-and-software corner of water technology I spend most of my time around. The problem it solves is what she calls a tale of two data worlds. On one side, the raw material is buried and scattered, about 30 federal agencies in the United States hold water data, across close to 60 separate information systems, in more than 550 different data types, with no common standards, so finding it and making sense of it is close to impossible for any one person. On the other side, people who do find a single source get only one slice, which she compares to touching one part of an elephant and thinking you have felt the whole animal.

Kimberly Nelson's answer is to aggregate all of that data, normalize it, score it, and put it on a map. True Elements assigns what it calls a TrueQI score, a quality number on a familiar scale (think 70 to 100, red, yellow, green) that a decision-maker can read at a glance and then drill into to see exactly why a watershed or a zip code earned the number it did, right down to a drinking-water score dragged down by disinfection byproducts bumping against their legal limit. The piece she is proudest of is breadth: where most companies handle one kind of water, True Elements works across drinking water, surface water and groundwater, current and future, because, as she puts it, all water is connected, so giving people only one part of the picture is a strange way to run an intelligence company. The ambition is concrete: the United States has roughly 3 million miles of waterways, and True Elements has mapped about a million of them so far, focused on where the most people, and the most risk, are.

Kimberly Nelson is blunt about why all of this matters now. For her, this is water's moment, and the number she reaches for is that 90% of the impacts of climate change show up as water, in the form of drought, sea-level rise, flooding and extreme weather, and the United States alone saw more than a billion dollars of those events in a single recent year. Her conviction is that the bottleneck has never really been collecting the data, because the world is drowning in it, the bottleneck is turning it into something people will actually act on, which is the difference between data and the intelligence she is selling. It is a fitting cause for someone whose whole career, from a state environment office to the EPA to Microsoft, has run on a single thread she keeps coming back to: environmental information, finally put to work.

“We live in a world of what I would call a tale of two data worlds. On one hand, you have dozens and dozens of different data sets available, about 30 federal agencies that have water data, close to 60 different information systems, over 550 different data types. There are no data standards. So how would you ever go and find all that data, bring it together, and make sense of it?”

She is, in the end, the rare operator who has sat on every side of the water-data problem, as a state regulator collecting it, as a federal CIO trying to publish it, and as a Microsoft executive moving it, and who has now taken the job of finally making it useful. The facts here come from her own words on the show, her public record, and my Leviathan database of the water sector (how I source them).