Wayne Byrne

Wayne Byrne did not set out to become a water investor, he got there by building and selling companies in the space for the better part of two decades. By his own account he has been involved in four successful exits over fifteen years, and the one that put him on the map is OxyMem, a spin-out of University College Dublin that he co-founded in 2013 and ran as chief executive. OxyMem commercialised something called a Membrane Aerated Biofilm Reactor, or MABR, which is a much more energy-efficient way of getting oxygen into the bugs that eat the pollution in wastewater, and it caught the eye of the chemicals giant DuPont, which took an early stake and then exercised its option to buy the company outright in December 2019.

Wayne Byrne is unusually candid about how that exit actually happened, because it was not a lucky phone call out of the blue. He spent nearly three years inside the university team before the technology was even spun out, so the whole thing was closer to a ten-year journey, and from the start he was, in his words, trying to begin with the end in mind and work out who the rightful owner of the technology would be if you imagined its future correctly. DuPont was on that shortlist for years, the acquisition was negotiated over a long period after their first investment through the Dow Ventures group, and so by the time the deal closed it was, as he puts it, a logical outcome rather than a left-field offer.

Wayne Byrne also turned the hard part of scaling deep tech into a second business. Across all those capital-intensive resource-efficiency companies he kept hitting the same wall: when you ask a water utility or an industrial customer to buy a first-of-a-kind technology, they have to carry the technical risk on their own balance sheet, and most of them simply will not. So he built Method Capital, a model that matches capital to high-technical-risk projects and shifts that risk onto the provider of the capital, letting the customer adopt new kit as if it were a service agreement rather than a nerve-wracking capital purchase. It is the same instinct that now has him chairing boards at companies like the ceramic-membrane firm Membrion and advising founders through fundraises and exits.

Wayne Byrne keeps one piece of hard-won advice close, and it is the kind of thing you only earn by living through a few near-disasters. He tells other entrepreneurs that sometimes your worst day can actually be your best day, because over the years he has noticed that the moments he found himself in a real jam were often exactly the moments a strange clarity arrived, and an opportunity came out of the mess that, with hindsight, turned into a positive outcome. There is a nice symmetry to where that instinct has led him, because back in 2021 on my (don’t) Waste Water microphone he pointed me towards a young water fund called Burnt Island Ventures as the one to watch, and a few years later he joined it himself.

“Sometimes your worst day can actually be your best day. Over the years, I found myself in plenty of jams or challenging situations, and within that time, an opportunity can come from that, which, with the benefit of hindsight, results in probably a positive outcome.”

Wayne Byrne is, in short, a builder who learned to be a backer: the rare operator who has carried a water technology all the way from a university lab to a corporate balance sheet, and now spends his days helping the next set of founders do the same. You can read more about how I track these companies and their funding in my Leviathan database and on the methodology behind it.