Terry Paule

Terry Paule did not come to water through chemistry or engineering, and he is the first to say so: "I'm not a technical guy, I'm an investor guy, a money guy." Before water, Terry Paule spent forty years building companies across Australia and beyond, most notably a dairy business he grew over thirteen years and sold to a multinational. He came across his next idea in the most ordinary way, through a chance airport meeting with an old accountant friend, who pointed him toward a chemical engineer in Mildura, in regional Victoria, who was quietly "making water from carrots."

That carrot-water pilot plant is the seed of Botanical Water Technologies. The science underneath it is simpler than it sounds, which Terry Paule treats as a feature, not a weakness. Fruit, vegetables and sugarcane are roughly 95% water, so when thousands of factories around the world boil them down to make sugar, tomato paste or fruit concentrate, they drive off enormous amounts of that water as steam. That steam condenses into a clean byproduct that most plants simply throw away, often pumping it straight into a river, hot and untreated. Botanical Water Technologies captures that condensate instead and purifies it to drinking standard, creating what Terry Paule calls a new source of water hiding in plain sight inside the food supply chain, the kind of alternative supply I track across the rest of the water-tech landscape.

The part that makes Botanical Water Technologies more than a clever recycling trick is the platform Terry Paule built around it. Rather than own every step the way he once owned an entire dairy value chain, a mistake he says he vowed never to repeat, he kept Botanical Water Technologies as a technology and platform business and contracted out the rest. The company worked with Fujitsu to build a water trading exchange, a digital ledger Terry Paule prefers to call the "source of truth" rather than lead with the word blockchain, where processors, beverage brands, utilities and NGOs can buy, sell or sponsor the recovered water and its credits. It is closer to a marketplace for an entirely new water supply than to a piece of treatment hardware.

That model is why a software company ended up in the drinking-water business. Microsoft partnered with Botanical Water Technologies on a project to grow water for communities in India, starting in the Nagpur region, as part of Microsoft's pledge to be water-positive by 2030, and Abu Dhabi's International Holding Company took a stake through its sustainability arm in late 2023, which is the kind of audited backing I hold to a transparent standard in my methodology. For an idea that began as bottled carrot water sold to a few restaurants, that is a long way to travel in a handful of years, and it tells you something about how Terry Paule operates: he reads where capital and policy are heading, then finds the focused, contractable version of a big messy problem that an investor will actually back.

“We don't have to make something complicated to sound smart. The simplicity is its charm. Sometimes less is more.”

Terry Paule is, in short, the commercializer rather than the inventor: the serial founder who can hold the cap table, the contract and the customer relationship in the same conversation, which is most of why a carrot-water pilot plant turned into a Microsoft-backed global water platform.