Laura Gallindo

Laura Gallindo did not come to water through engineering, and that turns out to be the point. She started her career in Brazil as a television news producer, moved into corporate communications at Dow, and then spent years at DuPont running marketing for its water-treatment business across North and South America. By the time she joined Grundfos in 2023, she had about a decade in water and a rare skill for the sector: she can take a complicated industrial story and make a normal person care about it. That is most of why she ended up being the person who explained, on my microphone, what a famous Danish pump company was actually trying to become.

Laura Gallindo joined Grundfos at an unusually candid moment. The company traces back to 1945, when its founder built an innovative pump in his basement, and it has since spread to roughly 100 countries. But in Laura’s telling, leadership sat down and asked a blunt question, which markets do we actually want to play to win, and reorganised the whole business around four verticals: commercial, domestic, industry, and water utilities. Water utilities is the smallest of the four by revenue and, she argues, the one with the most room to grow, especially in the United States, where the division runs out of a base near Houston, Texas.

Laura Gallindo keeps returning to one structural fact that makes Grundfos different from its rivals, which is who owns it. About 87.5% of Grundfos is held by the Poul Due Jensen Foundation, the family foundation named after the founder, so the company is not answering to public-market shareholders every quarter. She frames that ownership as permission to think long, to blend charity with a real business model, and to aim at something most pump companies would never put on a slide: reaching 300 million people with access to drinking water by 2030. That ambition, she says, is the core and the heart of the company, not a side project.

Laura Gallindo is also refreshingly willing to name the awkward part, which is that a pump company is, by its own admission, part of the problem it now wants to solve. Grundfos became the first water-solutions company with a validated SBTi target, the Science Based Targets initiative being the body that independently checks corporate net-zero plans, and it has committed to halving its direct emissions by 2030 on the way to net zero by 2050. Laura is candid that a business which has spent decades pumping groundwater has helped deplete the aquifers it now sells sensors to monitor, and that the honest move is to build the technology, like its 2023 acquisition Metasphere, that helps utilities see the problem coming.

Laura Gallindo is, in the end, the translator the water sector quietly needs more of. The technology and the targets are real, but a 300-million-people ambition only means something if someone can explain why a private Danish manufacturer is the one chasing it, and make an investor, a utility, or a refugee-camp operator believe it. That is the job she does, and she does it without the usual corporate gloss, which is rarer than it should be.

“The core and the heart of Grundfos is to reach 300 million people. It’s a huge ambition by 2030.”