Liquid Assets

New York City's Department of Environmental Protection moves 1 billion gallons of drinking water a day to more than 9.6 million people, and about 95 percent of it arrives by gravity from 19 upstate reservoirs. The watersheds are protected well enough that federal rules let most of that water be delivered unfiltered. It is the largest combined municipal water and wastewater utility in the country, and it is aging.A startup does not get to put a sensor on that by cold email. Anushree Sreedhar runs the Environmental Tech Lab at the Partnership for New York City, a structured pilot program built with DEP that gives companies a real way in. In three years the lab has partnered with 24 companies, helped two land commercial procurements, and has about five more underway.What we get into:Why a careful utility is careful for good reasons, and why that is a feature rather than an obstacleThe four stages: challenge discovery, public posting, a two-phase evaluation, then a three-month proof of concept with an optional three-month extensionWho is on the hook when a pilot stalls. The Partnership hosts the check-ins and holds DEP to the timelines; DEP assigns a project manager who sets the goals and KPIsThe three buckets that cover almost every water technology: software, sensors, and energy and resource recoveryThe honest part: a successful pilot is not a purchase order. The companies that convert usually arrive with results and existing customers already behind themApplications for the fourth round are open now and close October 23. The challenges are open to companies anywhere in the world. Apply to the ETL.Anushree Sreedhar is Director of Innovation Programs at the Partnership for New York City, where she runs the Environmental Tech Lab with NYC DEP and the Buildings Tech Lab with NYC DOB. She patented a fire extinguisher redesign at 20 and came to water by way of product design, enterprise software, and vertical farming.Companies mentioned: Gryps, Manhole Metrics, InPipe Energy, Knaq. Anushree is reading Recoding America.Also available on: YouTube and at liquidassets.cc.Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA. Premium water care since 1964.

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/