Ravid Levy

Ravid Levy did not set out to work in water. He studied environmental biology, first a bachelor's at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then a master's at Tel Aviv University, and only fell into the sector once he started working for private companies that happened to treat water, where, in his own words, he got hooked. That accidental start turned into a 20-year career, including a stint he describes as one of the formative experiences of his life: being sent to Australia to run an operation there for several years, as regional manager for the Israeli firms Nirosoft and Amiad, in Melbourne, from 2005 to 2010.

Ravid Levy describes himself as someone who links the technological side and the business side of water and wastewater innovation, and after years inside Israeli water-tech companies he turned that vantage into a practice of his own. He spent the first 15 years building and deploying water technologies around the world, as an engineer and then CTO (chief technology officer) at RWL Water and VP of technology at Fluence, and since 2019 he has worked as a consultant, founding RLV-consulting and later directing WaterEdge.IL. Along the way he added a third language, research, through a business-development role at the Migal research institute in far-north Israel, because so much of what the water business does starts as basic science that nobody has yet carried out of the lab.

Ravid Levy's most repeated piece of advice to water innovators is the least glamorous one, which is patience. He points out that the water industry adopts new technology far more slowly than the digital world does, so the Waze-or-Zoom fantasy of building a prototype and booming into the market simply does not happen here, and the work is a long grind of piloting and proof in real conditions. He has a sharper opinion too, which is that a little skepticism is a good sign: if everyone already agrees a new idea is perfect and bound to work, it probably is not innovative enough to matter.

Ravid Levy is also one of the clearest voices on why Israel's water system actually works, and his answer surprises people because it is not really a startup story. He credits two unfashionable pillars: central planning, and a national water law that treats all water, including seawater and groundwater, as a public asset to be managed as one system. That framing is what lets Israel reuse roughly 85 percent of its domestic wastewater for agriculture, a figure he is careful to attribute to policy and management rather than to any single clever technology. He loves the startup-nation branding, he says, but for water he wants people to separate the hype of the startups from the harder, quieter achievement of managing a scarce resource well.

“If everyone agrees that a new innovation is spot on and perfect and will work, it is probably not innovative enough. So there will have to be some skeptics around, that will say why it will not work. You always have to listen to them.”

Ravid Levy is, in the end, a connector: a former operator who now spends his days standing between researchers, companies, and regulators and getting them to understand one another, which in an industry this slow to change is most of the job.