Meshal Alduraywish

Meshal Alduraywish did not come up through pipes and pumps. He trained as an industrial engineer at King Saud University in Saudi Arabia, spent three years at Boston Consulting Group in their private-equity practice, picked up an MBA at Columbia, and then, in 2019, joined Sciens Water in New York, where he is a Vice President. Sciens Water is a private-equity fund, so when Meshal talks about water he talks about it the way an investor does: where does capital flow, where are the gaps, and which technology will an operator actually pay for. That investor's eye is exactly why his episode is titled around a question a lot of people quietly Google, which is how to invest wisely in water in the first place.

Meshal Alduraywish keeps coming back to one number, and it is the one worth remembering. If you line the water sector up next to the energy sector, he says, water lags by about seven years on digitization. Now that is an easy figure to nod at and forget, so here is the way he frames it: assume the energy utilities froze today and stopped modernizing, and it would still take water seven years just to catch up to where energy already is. The gap is not closing, it is widening, and for something as basic as a smart meter. For an investor that lag is the whole thesis, because a sector that far behind is a sector with a long runway of things worth funding.

Meshal Alduraywish describes his own job as research, but he is quick to qualify it as actionable research, not research that ends up in a drawer. The version he is wary of is the easy one: the top-down, desktop kind you can pull off Google, where every leak-detection or remote-monitoring technology looks like a no-brainer that every utility should obviously buy tomorrow. The part most people skip, he says, is going and actually talking to the operators on the ground, hearing their budget limits and their resource limits, and then recalibrating your sense of which technologies are real. Do that and you start to see the mismatch he sees between what the sector is offered and what it actually needs.

Meshal Alduraywish makes this concrete through Sciens Water's portfolio, and especially through CSWR, short for Central States Water Resources, a utility that owns water systems across the US. Some of its assets sit miles from the main plant, lift stations and pump stations and manholes you used to check by sending someone out in a truck, and a surprising number of utilities still run on autodialers, a piece of last-century kit that literally phones you when something breaks. Swapping that for remote monitoring you can read off your phone is the kind of unglamorous upgrade Sciens backs. The catch, and the reason it is slow, is that water is intensely local: nobody buys a sensor off Amazon to run their utility, so adoption spreads by word of mouth, one operator watching a neighbor check his assets on a phone and deciding he wants that too.

Meshal Alduraywish is, in the end, betting on the boring stuff getting digital, and on the talent that follows it. One of his favorite signals is that when a utility adopts this technology, it starts attracting a younger generation that wants to work with data and tools rather than clipboards, and he flags cybersecurity, an underrated national risk for water systems, as the next place that capital and attention will go. It is a quietly optimistic case, and a useful one to hear from the money side of the table.

“Based on my research and the team's research, we find emerging trends, challenges within the water, and we address these challenges with investments.”

If you want the investor's read on where water technology is worth backing, his episode is the place to start.