Matthew Silver

Matthew Silver did not set out to build a water company, and he will tell you that himself: "if I had done water engineering, I would not have started a water company." Matthew came at it from space. He worked at the Canadian Space Agency on an autonomous greenhouse on Devon Island in the Arctic, then went to MIT's Space Systems Lab and did work for NASA, and he had a job offer at the Jet Propulsion Lab in his pocket before he decided he would rather start his own thing. What pulled him in was synthetic biology, which is just engineering applied to living cells, and a technology called bioelectrochemical systems that sits at the odd intersection of electrochemistry, fuel cells and biology. So he started a little company to do applied R&D around it, with, in his words, "no grand scheme of like, we're going to take over the water industry."

Cambrian Innovation literally began with a grant from NASA. Matthew was a research scientist at MIT's Space Systems Lab, and the grant was for using electrically active organisms to recycle air and water for astronauts, what the field calls regenerative life support. For the first four years Cambrian was essentially an applied-research shop funded by the US government, and the name itself is a small joke that tells you how the founders think: it sounds a bit like Cambridge, and the Cambrian era in geology is the one where biological life suddenly exploded in variety, which is the bet, that biotech is about to do the same thing for how we manage resources. Only once Matthew was inside the work did he learn the thing that reframed the whole venture: water challenges are enormous, a lot of very smart people are looking for better answers, and it is genuinely hard to do, and he is, as he puts it, "maybe unfortunately drawn to difficult challenges."

Matthew Silver runs Cambrian on a simple promise to its customers: there is money and energy trapped in your dirty water, and we will get it back for you. The core product is EcoVolt, an anaerobic reactor, meaning it cleans wastewater without oxygen, and the useful trick of anaerobic treatment is that the bugs doing the work give off biogas, so the same box that cleans the water also makes energy. Cambrian aims this at high-strength industrial wastewater, the kind that is heavy with organic content, measured as BOD or biological oxygen demand, and the bulk of its work has been in food and beverage, treating what comes out of breweries, wineries and processing plants for customers including Anheuser-Busch, Sapporo, Keurig Dr Pepper and LVMH. The pitch is a genuine win-win: a manufacturer cuts the cost of getting rid of its wastewater while getting clean, reusable water and energy back into the plant.

The piece of Cambrian that travelled furthest is not a machine, it is a contract. Matthew Silver invented what Cambrian calls a Water-Energy Purchase Agreement, or WEPA, where the customer does not buy a treatment plant at all but instead pays Cambrian by the gallon of water treated or the kilowatt-hour of energy generated, and Cambrian designs, builds, owns and runs the system. The idea came straight from a customer who told him, more or less, this looks better than the alternative but you do not have enough of a track record for me to be convinced, so install it and I will pay you if it works. So Matthew went and studied how the successful solar companies like Sunrun and SunEdison had cracked the same trust problem, borrowed their pay-as-you-go model, and in doing so removed the two things that stop industrial customers from adopting new water tech: the upfront capital and the operating risk.

Matthew Silver is worth listening to because he is clear-eyed about why his corner of the world is so hard, and he does not pretend otherwise. The way he frames it, software and pharma get to live with a low number of uncertainties, because nobody really doubts you can finish a piece of software or that a working drug will find a market, whereas in water and energy you stack the uncertainties on top of each other: you have to prove a new process works small, then prove it scales, then convince a famously conservative industry to actually adopt it even when it is better. He learned that the painful way, with a pilot plant that worked and a partner who then changed priorities and did not scale it, which left other prospects assuming it must have failed. What keeps him at it is not the engineering, it is the impact, and after fourteen years and a 2023 sale of the company to Pennybacker that came with a $200 million commitment to keep growing it, the line he keeps returning to still holds: "it's not fun unless you're having an impact."

“It's not fun unless you're having an impact.”

Matthew Silver is, in the end, the aerospace engineer who found his hardest problem at the bottom of an industrial drain and built a company, and a business model, to mine value out of it. You can hear how he tells the origin story on the early Cambrian episode below, or how he weighs the $200M exit on the later one, and you can see where Cambrian sits among the companies I track in my Leviathan database of the water industry.