Matt Boczkowski

Matt Boczkowski did not start Aquaporin and he is careful to say so. The company was founded in Denmark back in 2005 by a biotech researcher, built around a genuinely beautiful idea: the aquaporin protein, which is the tiny channel that moves water in and out of the cells of your kidneys and of plant roots, and which earned its discoverer Peter Agre a Nobel Prize in 2003. Aquaporin's bet was that if you borrow that channel from nature and embed it into an industrial membrane, you get a filter that lets water through and holds almost everything else back. Matt spent most of his career in big companies before this - years at GE Water and then at SUEZ - and when he took over as CEO in 2021 he walked into a Nasdaq-listed deep-tech firm that had the science but still had to build the market.

Matt Boczkowski's real job at Aquaporin was a balancing act, and it is the thing the episode is named after. The company does two kinds of osmosis. Reverse osmosis, which is the everyday technology that pushes water through a membrane under pressure to clean it, is where most of the revenue came from, especially the point-of-use filters that sit under a sink, because the barriers to entry there are low and the cash comes in steadily. Forward osmosis, which lets a salty draw solution pull clean water across the membrane with far less energy, is the harder, more exciting bet, and it barely has a market yet. Matt's framing was simple: sell the reverse-osmosis products that pay the bills, and use that money to keep developing forward osmosis for the few places it can do something nobody else can.

And the places Aquaporin chased with forward osmosis are genuinely fun. The company signed a joint development agreement with E. & J. Gallo, the largest winemaker in the world, to concentrate grape juice gently enough to keep the aromas a winery actually cares about. It also flew its membranes to the International Space Station, working with the European Space Agency on the problem of recycling an astronaut's wastewater back into drinking water, because in space you want to reuse as close to 100% of your water as you possibly can. Matt was honest that the space work was never going to move the bottom line, but as he put it, it was fantastic for the brand and it got Aquaporin onto the news in Denmark, which for a small listed company is its own kind of currency.

Matt Boczkowski is also unusually candid about the weight of running a listed company that is not yet profitable. He talked about the responsibility of knowing that people's livelihoods depend on Aquaporin reaching break-even, and about the stress of having to go back to the market to raise money, including an April 2024 rights issue of around $25 million that the company hoped would be its last before standing on its own. He leans on a worldview that is worth borrowing: the water business grows incrementally, not in pharma-style home runs, so you have to look at it partly through a lens of doing something for the greater good and not purely as an investment. It is a grounded way to think about a hard, slow, important industry, and it is most of why this conversation stuck with me.

Matt Boczkowski stepped down as CEO of Aquaporin in July 2025 and moved back to North America, and he is now an Executive Vice President at USIC, an infrastructure-services company based in the United States, while also serving as an operating partner at the water-focused investment firm Cimbria Capital. Aquaporin itself did not make it: after Matt's departure, a later fundraising attempt failed and the company entered insolvency and was declared bankrupt in early 2026. That ending does not erase the work, and Matt's account of how you actually run a science-rich water company - the membrane chemistry and the cap table held in the same head - is exactly the kind of operator's view I built my Leviathan database to keep a record of.

“A lot of the growth is incremental. People tend to look for those home runs, like in the pharma industry where you get a clinical trial and then, boom, you're a billion-dollar company. No, the water space is incremental, and it's a big problem for the planet. So you have to look at it from a lens of doing something for the greater good, and not just from an investment point of view.”