Scott Bryan

Scott Bryan did not come to water from an engineering bench or a utility. He came from finance, and from a very particular corner of it. In the early 2000s he was a social-investment analyst at Piper Jaffray and then a consultant at Royal Bank of Canada, working with pension funds and foundations right as the field was shifting from socially responsible investing into what we now call ESG, the screening of companies on environmental, social and governance risk. From that seat he watched institutional money pour into clean energy, and he kept noticing the one sector getting almost none of it. As he puts it, water “really wasn’t receiving the same attention as renewables” and “didn’t have the vibrant ecosystem that one might expect for an industry of this size.”

Scott Bryan’s way in was a water-philanthropy project he helped launch at Royal Bank of Canada, which sent him looking for an organisation that could back water entrepreneurs and could not find one. “We wanted something like Imagine H2O. We just didn’t know it existed,” he told me. So he joined the volunteer team helping a Harvard Business School idea, hatched by Tamin Pechet and Matt Evans, become a real organisation, and underwrote its first three years. When the search for someone to run it stalled in 2009, he made a quietly characteristic move and decided he might be that person himself. He has been president of Imagine H2O since 2010.

Imagine H2O is a non-profit accelerator, and the most important thing to understand about it is the part Scott Bryan is most deliberate about: it takes no equity in the companies it helps. That is unusual for an accelerator, and it is the whole strategy. Because Imagine H2O is neither a fund nor a consulting firm, it can sit as a neutral convener between founders, investors, philanthropists and the municipalities and utilities that are usually the real buyers of water technology, without the conflicts of interest that would otherwise scare a city procurement office. From a business-plan competition in 2009 it grew into a full programme, then added Imagine H2O Asia, a Singapore-based effort built around an on-and-off dialogue with the city’s water utility PUB, and an Urban Water Challenge.

Scott Bryan is also refreshingly unwilling to oversell his own sector, which for a curious outsider is the useful part. He will tell you water venture funding is still “less than 1% of all climate venture investments” and that water does not always fit the venture-capital model, because the solutions are slow, local and often invisible, sitting “in the back of a wastewater treatment plant” rather than on your roof like a solar panel or in your driveway like a Tesla. His job, as he frames it, is to help founders navigate that fragmented landscape and “get to yes or no faster,” and to be honest with the ones whose idea is a good lifestyle business but not a scalable company. After more than a decade and 150-plus startups, that mix of conviction and realism, the same realism I lean on across my Leviathan database, is most of why Imagine H2O became the reference accelerator in water.

“I think of a phrase that stuck with me very early on in our days at Imagine H2O. It came from David Stanton, and that’s: water’s a global opportunity at a local market.”

Scott Bryan is, in the end, the rare water champion who sells the opportunity and the limits in the same breath, which is exactly the register a curious outsider needs to hear before writing a cheque.