Rebuilding America's Water: A D-Minus Grade and a $1 Trillion Bill
The American Society of Civil Engineers grades U.S. water infrastructure a D-minus. Kevin Gast, co-founder, CEO and chairman of VVater, puts the bill for just maintaining it at about $1 trillion over the next 20 years. The systems are old, fewer people are training to run them, and the control software behind them was never built for an open internet.
Kevin spun VVater out of a family engineering conglomerate that has done 14,000 to 15,000 projects over 60 years. Its answer to membranes, filters and chemicals is the Farady Reactor, which treats water with alternating current at under 12 volts.
What we get into:
Where the trillion dollars goes, and why few people are training to run the plants
How old control systems leave water utilities open to attack
Why the tap water you drink has already been used upstream, and why reuse is the real choice
How the Farady Reactor treats water with electricity in place of membranes and chemicals
Where it fits: resort pools, wastewater plants, factories and homes
Kevin Gast is the co-founder, CEO and chairman of VVater (https://vvater.com), headquartered in Austin, Texas. He grew up in South Africa and watched Cape Town approach Day Zero. His book pick is The Count of Monte Cristo.
Also available on: YouTube (https://youtu.be/fhEXwbj8J18) and at liquidassets.cc (https://www.liquidassets.cc/rebuilding-americas-water-kevin-gast/), with the full write-up and transcript.
Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA. Premium water care since 1964.
21 Sept 2026
Utilities Are Careful for a Reason. New York Built a Way In.
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 obstacle
The four stages: challenge discovery, public posting, a two-phase evaluation, then a three-month proof of concept with an optional three-month extension
Who 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 KPIs
The three buckets that cover almost every water technology: software, sensors, and energy and resource recovery
The honest part: a successful pilot is not a purchase order. The companies that convert usually arrive with results and existing customers already behind them
Applications 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 (https://www.envirotechlab.nyc/apply).
Anushree Sreedhar is Director of Innovation Programs at the Partnership for New York City (https://pfnyc.org), 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 (https://gryps.io), Manhole Metrics, InPipe Energy, Knaq (https://knaq.io). Anushree is reading Recoding America.
Also available on: YouTube (https://youtu.be/o5Zyij_p0WM) and at liquidassets.cc (https://www.liquidassets.cc/nyc-environmental-tech-lab-anushree-sreedhar/).
Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA. Premium water care since 1964.
10 Sept 2026
Water Is a Trillion-Dollar Industry Hiding in Plain Sight | Tom Ferguson, Burnt Island Ventures
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 Ventures
Host: Ravi Kurani
CHAPTERS
0:00 Intro
0:46 The S-curve, and where water sits on it
4:35 Why execution, not ideas, is the bottleneck
11:18 Why now: what changed around 2020
16:18 What exits actually look like in water
19:40 The capital spectrum: venture, PE, search funds
21:46 Private credit and the water bond market
24:37 Where water needs people right now
26:30 From Imagine H2O to raising Fund I
30:32 Why they pass on most water companies
35:01 The weirdest ideas that turned out to be good ones
41:09 Agriculture, and the next PFAS investment
42:13 AI, data, and what still has a moat
48:21 Long sales cycles as a moat
49:44 Growing up between London and the west coast of Scotland
55:40 The unromantic reality of running a fund
1:02:24 Water rights, and why he stays out of them
1:07:21 The best life advice, from The Wire
1:09:14 Where to reach Burnt Island (not with AI)
LINKS
Burnt Island Ventures: https://www.burntislandventures.com
Tom's podcast, The Fundamental Molecule: https://www.burntislandventures.com/the-fundamental-molecule
Full 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
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