Navkaran Singh Bagga

Navkaran Singh Bagga did not arrive in water as an engineer or an activist. He arrived as a businessman, and he will tell you so himself. A second-generation entrepreneur from Kolkata, he did his undergraduate degree in the UK, came back to run a family export house, opened a mid-segment hotel, and then bought and turned around a struggling steel unit before selling his stake. Each time the business stabilised he got bored, and around mid-2016 the next thing he went looking for was a sector with a long runway. He landed on water, and the spark, charmingly, was a film: in The Big Short, the character who saw the 2008 crash coming ends the movie putting all his money into water. Bagga took the hint, and when California traded the first water futures in December 2020, he felt vindicated.

Navkaran Singh Bagga built Akvo around a deliberately simple idea, what engineers call atmospheric water generation, or AWG. The physics is the cold glass on a hot day: leave it out and water beads on the outside, because cooling air below its dew point pulls the moisture out. Akvo does that at scale, drawing in ambient air, chilling it until the humidity condenses, then filtering and mineralising the result into drinking water. "I just tried to make a better mousetrap," is how he frames it, and his one engineering boast is efficiency: Akvo set out to build, in his words, the most power-efficient AWG it could, because the whole model only works if a litre of water from air costs roughly what a litre of bottled water already costs.

Navkaran Singh Bagga is careful about what problem he is actually solving. The planet is not short of water, he argues, it is short of accessible potable water, and the fix does not have to be a giant centralised plant. His favourite analogy is energy: atmospheric water generation is to water what solar is to power, something you can put modular and decentralised, plugged into a wall, with no grid and no transmission behind it. That is why he chose it over desalination or wastewater reuse, both of which need heavy infrastructure money before a single drop moves. And he is refreshingly honest about the ceiling: Akvo needs heat and humidity to work, so it suits tropical, urban, on-grid settings, and it is, in his own words, no silver bullet.

Navkaran Singh Bagga says the hardest part was never the machine, it was getting anyone to pay for water at all. He keeps coming back to one sales call that broke him a little: a prospective customer told his team it was morally wrong to charge so much for a machine that makes water. He understood the reaction even as it stung, because water and air are the two things people treat as sacrosanct, things that should simply be free. So Akvo's pitch is not "we sell you water," it is "we sell you the technology, and increasingly the service," and that distinction is the whole battle. His answer has been education over marketing (he hired a PR firm before he hired sales) and a slow pivot from selling hardware toward water as a service, where a building tops up a balance and the machine pours water against it.

“How can you charge so much money for a machine that makes water? This is morally not correct. ... We're not here to sell you water, we're trying to change the way things are done.”

Navkaran Singh Bagga is, in the end, the rare founder who treats a planetary problem as a market he can patiently build into, which is exactly why the one episode he recorded with me still answers the question most people actually have about his field: is water from air a scam, or a gift?