Kobe Nagar

Kobe Nagar did not set out to clean water. He started in the defense industry, where, in his own words, he was "fascinated by rockets," decided it was "not as glamorous as people think," and turned, as he puts it, "to the bright side of the world of renewable and cleantech." Geothermal energy at Ormat, fuel cells at FuelCell Energy, a startup turning CO2 into cement, and then Duke University, where in 2018 he co-founded 374Water out of a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Reinvent the Toilet challenge. The throughline across all of it is taking a hard, fringe technology and pushing it past the status quo.

Kobe Nagar likes to describe 374Water's machine as a "magic blue box where poop gets in on one side and you get water and energy on the other side." The real name is supercritical water oxidation, or SCWO. Push water past its critical point, which sits at 374 degrees Celsius and 221 times atmospheric pressure (that is where the company's name comes from), and it stops behaving like ordinary water: it becomes a powerful solvent for organic molecules, and once you add oxygen you get the strongest oxidizing environment around, one that snaps the carbon bonds in almost any organic waste in 4 to 40 seconds. The process is feedstock-agnostic, so fecal sludge, plastics and PFAS all go in the same door.

Kobe Nagar built 374Water around a distinction most of the water industry blurs. "A lot of folks talking about PFAS solution, but they're basically talking about removing PFAS," he says. "I think we are one of the only companies that are talking about elimination." PFAS, the "forever chemicals" found in non-stick coatings, firefighting foam and a worrying amount of drinking water, are usually captured onto a spent filter or into a brine that still has to be trucked away and stored, which Kobe calls PFAS sequestration, pushing the problem "to another location or the next generation." 374Water mineralizes the molecules instead, destroying them at over 99.99 percent and leaving inert gas and recoverable minerals, including the phosphorus utilities pay to recover, behind.

Kobe Nagar's second trick is energy. Destroying a molecule that stubborn normally costs a lot of power, which is the standard knock on destruction technologies, but the supercritical reaction is exothermic, so it taps the chemical energy already locked in the waste to sustain itself. 374Water's smallest containerized unit, sized for a community of about 6,000 people, runs close to energy-neutral, and at roughly 30,000-person scale the system becomes a net producer of electricity. That is the difference between a process that adds to a utility's energy bill and one that, in his framing, treats waste as "the ultimate resource."

Kobe Nagar calls 374Water "half a unicorn or a zebra," and says his horizon is "connecting the drops between water, waste, energy and food" in a more decentralized way than the industry runs today. He spun the company out of Duke with professor Marc Deshusses, took it public through a reverse merger with PowerVerde (it trades on Nasdaq as SCWO), and 374Water has raised about $23.8 million to date. Kobe stepped down as 374Water's CEO in 2023, and in 2024 he co-founded 7E, an AI compliance platform that keeps companies continuously audit-ready, applying the same instinct, take something painful and overdue for reinvention, to environmental regulation instead of water chemistry.

“A lot of folks talking about PFAS solution, but they're basically talking about removing PFAS. I think we are one of the only companies that are talking about elimination.”

Kobe Nagar is, at heart, a process engineer who keeps finding the hardest problem in a field and engineering his way through it, which is why his answer to forever chemicals was never to store them somewhere safer, but to make them stop existing.