Mirka Wilderer

Mirka Wilderer did not stumble into water, she was more or less raised in it, because her father is Professor Peter Wilderer, who won the 2003 Stockholm Water Prize, which is about as close as the water world gets to a Nobel. She has said that watching her father win the field's most prestigious award is what pushed her to follow the family legacy, and she has now spent more than twenty-five years doing exactly that, building and scaling the companies that keep our water clean.

Mirka Wilderer is not a one-technology founder, and that is the thing to understand about her. Her trade is taking water-technology businesses and making them scale, and she has done it across some of the biggest names in the sector: Siemens Water, then Evoqua (which was the Siemens water arm carved out by private equity), then De Nora, then AqueoUS Vets. The through-line is operational, she builds the management system, sharpens the commercial focus and integrates the acquisitions, which is far less glamorous than inventing a membrane but is usually what decides whether a water company actually grows.

Mirka Wilderer became the first female CEO of De Nora Water Technologies in 2019, and her show story is what she did next: she grew that water business and took the parent, Industrie De Nora, all the way to an initial public offering on the Milan stock exchange in 2022. She did it largely by acquisition, buying small focused companies and folding them in, and her own metaphor for it is worth keeping, because she talks about taking these little gems and, diamond-like, setting them into a crown. Her rule for making that work is people-first: when you buy a company you are buying its capabilities, so the job is to make the acquired team feel valued rather than swallowed.

Mirka Wilderer then took over AqueoUS Vets, a California company founded in 2015 and backed since 2022 by Bain Capital's Double Impact fund, and pointed it at PFAS. PFAS are the "forever chemicals" that turn up in firefighting foam, non-stick pans and a worrying amount of drinking water, and AqueoUS Vets is a pure player in removing them, using carbon and ion-exchange systems rather than chasing a broad portfolio. Under her, the company built the treatment plant for the Yorba Linda Water District in California, which at up to 25 million gallons a day is the largest ion-exchange PFAS treatment system in the US, and which is the kind of reference project that wins you the next ten.

Mirka Wilderer has a tell for how she actually runs a company, and she gives it almost as an aside, about the CEO title getting in the way:

“Sometimes people in any organization get intimidated by the CEO title. And like I always say, forget it. I'm here. I've got two hands. Let me help and move this forward.”

That hands-on, no-throne instinct, paired with a genuinely strategic head for the deals and the capital, is the rare combination that makes Mirka Wilderer useful in a sector that needs operators as badly as it needs inventors. As of 2026 she has stepped out of the CEO seat to work as an independent mentor and board director, which means the playbook she built over twenty-five years is now pointed at the next set of water companies trying to scale.