Prakash Govindan

Prakash Govindan likes to say Gradiant was started by “two guys with little to no experience in water,” and he means it as a compliment. He had done a mechanical-engineering PhD at MIT, building a desalination method called carrier gas extraction, and he had spent a stint at GE developing new products, which is where he says his real talent sits. So when he and co-founder Anurag Bajpayee licensed their MIT work and started Gradiant in 2013, they went looking not for the cleanest water problem but the ugliest one: the salty, variable wastewater coming off America's shale oil-and-gas boom, a market the big incumbents found too messy to bother with. Less competition, faster traction, and a customer who actually needed them.

Prakash Govindan is, at heart, a product guy, and that is the through-line of everything Gradiant builds. Carrier gas extraction was the flagship for the first year, the core of the company's first produced-water zero-liquid-discharge plant in Texas, and then the team kept inventing. They built CFRO, counterflow reverse osmosis (Gradiant sells it as RO Infinity), which is the first RO technology that can keep pushing water until the leftover brine is basically saturated salt. The practical payoff is the kind a customer cares about: in his words, Gradiant can take seawater-desalination brine and squeeze more fresh water out of it “at roughly the same cost” as the desalination itself, with no new intakes, outfalls or permits to build. Today that same instinct points at the thirstiest new customers in the world, the semiconductor fabs and AI data centers that need ultrapure water and a place for the dirty water to go.

Prakash Govindan is also refreshingly blunt about what frustrates him, and it is the same thing that makes him worth listening to. “Where the water industry frustrates me, honestly, is that lack of vision,” he told me: the people sending rockets to Mars and building electric cars can sell a dream, and water, somehow, cannot. His own pitch is the opposite of timid. He and Anurag, he says, have never once sat down to strategize an exit; the goal is to build “the most impactful water company in the world,” and the returns will follow. Gradiant has done its IPO-readiness homework without committing to a date, and the market has rewarded the patience. The data in my Leviathan database records the disclosed rounds climbing past $330 million, a Series C and a $225 million Series D, and in May 2026 a Series E that valued Gradiant at $2 billion, the month Prakash Govindan moved from chief operating officer to chief executive.

Prakash Govindan grew up in Chennai, in South India, and the entrepreneur showed up early. “Ever since childhood, I have started businesses out of my house in Chennai,” he says, including a small lending library he ran out of the family home at eight or nine years old, charging neighbours pocket money to borrow the books he had already devoured. That same restless, slightly geeky optimisation runs through how he builds product now: he believes in shipping a minimum viable product fast and in keeping his options open, a philosophy he sums up by saying he has never once resented Subway for making him choose between sixteen breads and seventeen vegetables. The harder discipline, he admits, is saying no, which is mostly Anurag's job.

“Minimum viable products are super important. The second thing I believe in is optionality. This is how I live my life. I never begrudged Subway for asking me to select between 16 breads and 17 different types of vegetables.”

He is, in short, an engineer who treats a company the way he treats a product: ship the version that works, keep your options open, and go after the problem everyone else thinks is too hard.