Liquid Assets

Tom Ferguson runs Burnt Island Ventures, the first venture fund dedicated entirely to water. In this conversation he lays out the investing case for a $1.6 trillion market most people have never thought about: where water sits on the S-curve, what changed around 2020, what exits actually look like, and what it costs the person running a small fund.Guest: Tom Ferguson, Founder and Managing Partner, Burnt Island VenturesHost: Ravi KuraniCHAPTERS0:00 Intro0:46 The S-curve, and where water sits on it4:35 Why execution, not ideas, is the bottleneck11:18 Why now: what changed around 202016:18 What exits actually look like in water19:40 The capital spectrum: venture, PE, search funds21:46 Private credit and the water bond market24:37 Where water needs people right now26:30 From Imagine H2O to raising Fund I30:32 Why they pass on most water companies35:01 The weirdest ideas that turned out to be good ones41:09 Agriculture, and the next PFAS investment42:13 AI, data, and what still has a moat48:21 Long sales cycles as a moat49:44 Growing up between London and the west coast of Scotland55:40 The unromantic reality of running a fund1:02:24 Water rights, and why he stays out of them1:07:21 The best life advice, from The Wire1:09:14 Where to reach Burnt Island (not with AI)LINKSBurnt Island Ventures: https://www.burntislandventures.comTom's podcast, The Fundamental Molecule: https://www.burntislandventures.com/the-fundamental-moleculeFull episode notes: https://www.liquidassets.cc/water-trillion-dollar-asset-class-tom-ferguson/Liquid Assets is a podcast about water through the lens of business, technology and policy.Subscribe: https://www.liquidassets.cc

The USDA Organic certification launched in 2002 and water will never qualify for it. Not because of a loophole, but because water isn't grown. That single fact sits at the center of everything Clara Sieg is building at Loonen, and it exposes a quiet gap in the clean-living movement that most consumers have never thought to question. Clara spent 14 years in venture capital before a round of IVF sent her down a rabbit hole she couldn't climb out of, and water turned out to be the one household category with no good answer.What we cover:- Why no bottled water can legally carry an organic label, and why conventional treatment was designed to eliminate pathogens, not preserve mineral quality, leaving disinfection byproducts behind while stripping minerals out.- Why spring water is not a guarantee of purity. Every spring Loonen tested across six months of US sourcing trips had at least one footnote: nitrates, arsenic, radium, glyphosate, or PFAS. Loonen's answer pairs a high-quality source in the Palomar Mountains outside San Diego with physical membrane filtration, no chemicals, all stainless steel from tanker to bottle.- How Loonen remineralizes after filtration, adding back Celtic sea salt, calcium, magnesium, and potassium to match the natural total dissolved solids of their source spring, typically between 110 and 170.- Why plastic and bottled water are a particularly bad combination. Time, heat, and light drive plastic degradation and leaching, and the bottled water supply chain maximizes all three. Loonen bottles exclusively in glass.- How roughly 90% of the approximately 50,000 to 55,000 community water systems in the US serve fewer than 5,000 people, and why aging infrastructure plus modern contaminants plus limited funding is a structural problem far wider than Flint.- How Loonen uses per-batch testing for microplastics, PFAS, bisphenols, phthalates, herbicides, pesticides, and pharmaceuticals, with results linked directly from a QR code on the bottle.Clara Sieg is the Co-Founder and CEO of Loonen, a premium water company reimagining how bottled water is sourced, treated, and packaged. Before Loonen she spent 14 years in venture capital, most recently at Revolution Ventures. LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clarasiegBook rec: Count Down by Shanna H. Swan (2021). The researcher whose work on endocrine-disrupting chemicals put numbers to the problem Clara went looking for a solution to. The line from that book to Loonen is short.Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/z_qRkjHHmTcWebsite: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

Your tap water passed every government test this morning, and it still contains contaminants the EPA has no mandate to remove. Zach Hamilton built 20 prototype reverse osmosis machines trying to solve that problem, and his answer is a laboratory-grade, all-stainless-steel RO system designed to last 20 years in your kitchen. His core argument is simple and a little unsettling: 150,000 separate water districts are doing their best, but the infrastructure is too old and too slow to protect you from modern contaminants. The solution has to happen at the tap.What this episode covers:- Why water is location-specific: source water, aging pipes, and your home's own plumbing all add their own signature to what comes out of the tap, making every water supply a different "soup"- How PFAS break the dose-makes-the-poison rule: as endocrine disruptors that mimic hormones, even trace concentrations at the parts-per-trillion level can trigger whole-system effects in the body- Why the regulatory clock moves too slowly: in Flint, the city waited more than a year after scientific confirmation before notifying residents, and that delay is structural, not exceptional- How reverse osmosis filters at the molecular level, forcing water through holes too small to see and diverting everything else to a waste stream, resulting in water so pure that minerals must be added back- Why Zach runs two UV stages in his prototypes to handle living contaminants like bacteria and cysts, and how he sees point-of-use filtration following the same decentralization path as building heating- The case against the printer-ink filter model: Aqueduct Research machines use standard, universally available filter media so owners are never locked into a proprietary replacement cycleZach Hamilton is the founder of Aqueduct Research, a company building residential reverse osmosis systems from durable, non-leaching materials. https://www.linkedin.com/in/zachhamiltonBook rec: "Finite and Infinite Games" by James P. Carse (1986). Zach has read it ten times. The distinction between games played to win and games played to keep playing reshapes how you evaluate almost every decision in business and in life.Also available on:YouTube: https://youtu.be/fvY6jZDabjcWebsite: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

Between 97 and 99 percent of all humans have measurable levels of PFAS in their blood. Every major watershed on Earth has tested positive, including the Arctic and Antarctica. Until recently, every technology designed to address that contamination just moved it somewhere else. Alec Ajnsztajn is trying to end that, by destroying the molecules entirely.As co-founder and CEO of CoFlux Purification, Alec is commercializing a covalent organic framework reactor that captures PFAS and then destroys the carbon-fluoride bonds under UV light, converting the molecules into fluoride and CO2. No concentrated waste. No hazmat landfill. No incineration truck. The contamination is gone.What we cover:Why PFAS compounds are nearly indestructible: carbon-fluoride bonds are among the strongest in organic chemistry, which made them invaluable from Manhattan Project equipment to Teflon cookware to semiconductor photoresists, and also why they accumulate in human tissue indefinitely.How every mainstream treatment technology today (granular activated carbon, ion exchange resins) concentrates PFAS rather than eliminating it, and why that concentrated waste still has to be incinerated or injected underground.Why CoFlux is starting upstream at contaminated aquifers, AFFF foam change-outs at airports and military bases, and industrial wastewater, rather than at the drinking water tap, where new materials face the highest regulatory bar.How the Department of Defense's March 2025 guidance carved out an explicit procurement pathway for novel PFAS destruction technologies, and why that distinction between a paid pilot and a real contract is the difference between runway and revenue.Why scaling PFAS capture nationally on granular activated carbon effectively means scaling coal mining, and what it would take for regulations to create on-ramps for destruction technology before the market ratifies incumbents for another generation.The physics of a deep-tech startup: CoFlux was built out of Alec's PhD and postdoctoral work at Rice University alongside co-founders Jeremy Daum and Dana, and after roughly two years of materials science development, the company's first field skid is heading to a government site in New Mexico this summer.Alec Ajnsztajn is the co-founder and CEO of CoFlux Purification, an Activate fellow company developing a covalent organic framework reactor that captures and destroys PFAS in contaminated water streams. He holds a Ph.D. from Rice University, where his work on porous photocatalytic polymers became the scientific foundation for CoFlux. Connect with Alec on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alec-ajnsztajn-ph-d-a6667564Book rec: Robert Caro's "The Power Broker" on how infrastructure gets built, who gets to decide, and what happens when accountability disappears from that process. Alec read it in high school, again in college, and says it still shapes how he thinks about where CoFlux fits into a 30 to 40 year infrastructure transition.Also available on: https://www.liquidassets.cc/

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has been turning green since the 1920s, and the reason is baked into its original design. The pool stretches roughly a third of a mile, sits one and a half to two and a half feet deep, holds about 6.5 million gallons, and was built on Washington D.C. marshland that has been slowly sinking ever since. Ravi Kurani brought in Terry Arko, Product Training and Content Manager at HASA Pool with over 45 years in the industry, to diagnose what is really going on and whether it can actually be fixed.What we cover:Still water is algae's best friend. The pool was intentionally designed to stay still to function as a mirror, which means strong surface circulation, the intervention that would help most, directly conflicts with the pool's purpose.The 1920s design got the basics wrong. Built on unstable marshland with asphalt paving and no meaningful filtration, the ground shifted so badly that engineers later had to drive large timber beams beneath the basin to stop it from sinking. The pool has been leaking roughly 16 million gallons of water per year.Nutrients have gotten worse over a century. Phosphates and nitrates in the Potomac watershed are significantly higher today than in the 1920s, driven by population growth, industrialized agriculture, and runoff, giving algae more fuel than it ever had.Nanobubbles buy time, not a cure. Nanobubble ozone systems stay neutrally buoyant in the water column for days or weeks, and combined with hydrogen peroxide generate hydroxyl radicals that destroy a wide range of contaminants. Terry is skeptical the technology alone can fully solve the problem given the pool's underlying design constraints.Chlorine still has no equal on green algae. After 45 years in the pool industry, Terry has not seen a more effective algaecide than chlorine for green algae. The challenge at the reflecting pool is the cost and logistics of daily liquid chlorine dosing at that scale, plus concerns about chloramine odor in a public monument setting.Offline circulation could be the workaround. Terry's proposed fix is to route water through a high-flow filtration loop located off-site, then reintroduce it gently so the surface stays still, preserving the mirror effect while giving the water the turnover and treatment it needs.Terry Arko is Product Training and Content Manager at HASA Pool, a manufacturer of liquid chlorine, liquid acid, and specialty pool chemicals, with over 45 years of experience across field service, chemical development, and water treatment formulations. Connect with Terry on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/terry-arko-32ab65187Book rec: Terry recommends "The Hidden Messages in Water" by Masaru Emoto (2005), which explores how environment and human behavior can affect the very structure of water, bridging the scientific and the personal.Also available on:Website: https://www.liquidassets.cc/