Roger Berry

Roger Berry is the rare water-tech CEO who did not invent the technology he sells, and he is the first to say so. Berry spent two decades in private equity and clean energy, from Climate Change Capital in London to running turnarounds for the clean-energy fund TEM Capital, before a chemistry company called Sudoc came to his doorstep in 2020. Sudoc had grown out of 40 years of work by Dr. Terry Collins at Carnegie Mellon University, who invented a family of catalysts called TAMLs (tetra-amido macrocyclic ligands, which is a mouthful for tiny iron-based molecules that mimic the enzymes your liver uses to break down toxins). Berry's job was never to do the chemistry. It was to turn a brilliant academic molecule into a business.

Roger Berry frames Sudoc's catalyst as a way to do oxidation, the chemistry of breaking pollutants apart, far more cheaply than the alternatives. The molecule activates ordinary hydrogen peroxide and, in Berry's words, when an independent study at UMass Amherst added it to an electrochemical system treating waste pharmaceuticals, it cut the energy demand by 90 percent and made the system roughly 40 times more efficient. That efficiency is the whole pitch, because the usual knock on advanced water treatment is that it costs too much energy to run at scale. One important honesty point that Berry volunteered on the show: the catalyst does not directly destroy PFAS, the famously stubborn forever chemicals, since their carbon-fluorine bonds are a different beast, and he is careful to say it is not a magic bullet.

Roger Berry's real signature is the business model, and it comes from a lesson every water investor learns the hard way. As one investor told him, the first question to ask any water technology is whether it has another way of making money, because the water market is slow to adopt, slow to pilot and expensive to enter. So Sudoc sells its chemistry as a simple drop-in additive (no new hardware, you dose it into the pump you already have) across two lines at once: cleaning products that generate revenue and customers today, and water treatment, branded NEAT, on a five-to-ten-year ladder toward utility scale. The cleaning side already has more than 100 customers, which is what keeps the company out of the pilot-purgatory that traps so many water startups.

Roger Berry's reason for being in this at all is more personal than the spreadsheet suggests. In January 2020, just as COVID was becoming a story, he survived a near-fatal pulmonary embolism, a blood clot in the lungs that carries a roughly 30 percent mortality rate, and two months later the Sudoc conversation landed. He spent the whole weekend dissecting what the business could become from every angle, the regulatory one, the commercial one, the scientific one. It is the instinct of someone who has spent his career sizing up other people's companies, finally pointed at one he could run himself, and his stated ambition is not a quick exit but to still be running Sudoc years from now.

“One investor once told me that the first question she asks any water technology is, do you have another way of making money? Because the market is slow to change, slow to adopt, slow to pilot, expensive to get in.”

That second revenue line is most of why Sudoc, alone among the deep-tech water companies I have hosted, can afford to take the long view on the chemistry.