Swapnil Shrivastav

Swapnil Shrivastav got into water through science fiction. In 2012, at 19, he entered a student competition with one of his future co-founders, themed around imagining the future of water in cities, and the big Star Wars fan he is proposed the most futuristic thing he could think of: making water from air. It could have stayed a student project, except that reality caught up. In 2016, in his final undergraduate year at NIT Calicut, his campus ran out of water, in a corner of India where it rains generously and freshwater sits all around. The team carried the idea into the Water Abundance XPRIZE and finished in the top-5 finalist round, the only Indian team of the five, selected from 98 entrants. At 23, Swapnil had a $50,000 grant in hand. Uravu Labs followed in 2019, in Bengaluru.

Swapnil Shrivastav then spent the following years learning that a prize does not make a market. The "water for all" playbook came first: CSR budgets (corporate social responsibility money), NGOs, community devices, and nobody willing to carry a new technology's risk. So Uravu flipped the model, and in his words, they now sell the water, not the technology. He calls it the Tesla strategy: start with premium applications while the technology matures. The Bangalore factory serving hospitality and beer clients brings in roughly $1 million in annual recurring revenue, pays itself back in under 24 months, and more than 80% of all the water Uravu made over the last two years found a paying customer. I unpacked the full strategy, and what it means for the whole water-from-air category, in my article on Uravu Labs' data-center bet.

Swapnil Shrivastav's cost numbers are the reason this story carries. Atmospheric water generation, AWG for short, the technology family that pulls drinking water out of humidity, has a rough reputation in water circles because it burns a lot of energy per liter. Uravu's answer is a proprietary liquid desiccant, a hypersaline salt solution roughly 15 times saltier than seawater, which soaks up moisture and releases it as distilled-grade water when heated. Five years before our conversation, that water cost 10 to 12 cents a liter to make; two years before, 5 cents; by the episode, Uravu was touching 2 cents a liter, levelized, on 12-cents-per-kWh grid electricity, with 1 cent in reach on waste heat. For contrast, SOURCE Global, the category's best-funded name with $223.8 million disclosed in my Leviathan database, died in March 2025 chasing off-grid drinking water. Uravu discloses $3.5 million and is still standing.

Swapnil Shrivastav's next act is why I had him on the show. About 18 months before we spoke, one of his investors, Peter from Echo River Capital, sent him stories about how much water data centers consume and asked: can you do something with this? The physics works in Uravu's favor, because AI-dense servers are moving to liquid cooling, which hands over exactly the higher-grade waste heat his desiccant loop wants. And he is refreshingly honest about the timeline: integration at scale is "probably 2 years away", because data centers are critical infrastructure and nobody lets a young company play with their cooling. The ambition behind it is bigger, though. He wants Uravu to become a foundational infrastructure company for "renewable water", riding the adoption curve solar PV rode into the energy mix, and he says he is probably the oldest in his own company, with a team averaging 24 or 25.

“Stop looking at water as just water.”

That was his message to water investors in our rapid-fire round, and it doubles as the shortest summary of Uravu you will find. I ran my own arithmetic on the waste-heat claim (it lands within peer-reviewed efficiency envelopes, on the efficient end though), so the bet is worth watching. And if you operate a data center or a climate-controlled farm, Swapnil said it on the record: he is looking for pilot partners.