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,...

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...

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...

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 wate...

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,...

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 Conte...

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, a data center somewhere uses water to cool its servers. Most people have no idea, and neither do the utilities supplying that water. Newsha Ajami, a hydrologist and founding director of Stanford's Governance for Risk, Resilience, Recovery Program (GR3), has spent years tracing water through the hidden seams of the economy, from the electricity charging yo...

A film festival launched because one filmmaker couldn't find a place to submit his short about pharmaceutical pollution in New York City's water supply is now pursuing official UN Water partner status, operating across four continents, and screening PFAS films to law students in Tanzania before they even know they have a PFAS problem. Robert Strand built the World Water Film Festival from...

One cubic meter of seawater holds enough deuterium to yield energy equivalent to 300 barrels of oil, and cold fusion may be the key to unlocking it. Cydian Kauffman, founder of Pure Water Northwest, traces the full arc from today's fragile water-energy grid to a future where coastal seawater simultaneously powers cities and produces drinking water as a byproduct. Along the way, he gets practic...

What does it actually take to do charity work that lasts? Ravi Kurani sits down with Dhwani Bhatt, a fourth-year chemical engineering student at Northeastern University and President of Engineers Without Borders, who grew up in Uganda and returned as a student engineer to build a solar-powered water distribution system for the village of Nakyenyi. In this episode:→ Why EWB surveys 50+ households b...

A working prototype means nothing if you can't manufacture it at scale. Brad Augustine — VP of Hardware Engineering at Inspiren, former VP of Hardware at Lululemon — is the engineer who scaled the Mirror connected fitness device from startup to a $500M acquisition. In this episode, he shares the product development playbook that water tech founders and engineers need to hear. Brad spent 20 yea...

Ravi Kurani sits down with Josh Dorfman, CEO and host of Supercool, to trace his journey from sustainable furniture startups to co-founding Plantd, a carbon-negative building materials company using renewable grass to replace plywood in homebuilding. Josh shares how Plantd landed a relationship with D.R. Horton (America's largest homebuilder) for 90,000 homes, why he left the CEO role to launc...

Ravi Kurani sits down with Rich Sloan , CEO of WAVR Technologies , to discuss a sobering reality: the era of abundant, subsidized water is officially over. From the "bathtub rings" of Lake Mead to the massive water footprint of the AI revolution, Rich explains why the next decade will be defined by the shift toward high-tech, point-of-use water harvesting. The conversation explores the b...

Most of us don’t think twice about what happens after we flush, but Jay Bernas spends every waking hour thinking about it. As the CEO of the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD), Jay oversees a "quasi-state" regional powerhouse that treats wastewater for nearly 2 million people. But this isn't your grandfather’s utility—HRSD is a world-class R&D incubator that holds global pa...

Sivan Zamir is the VP of Innovation & Venture at Xylem , a Fortune 500 leader in water technology. In this episode, Ravi Kurani and Sivan pulls back the curtain on the massive, invisible machine that keeps the modern world running. Sivan challenges the abstract concept of "the cloud," revealing that every data center, semiconductor chip, and cup of coffee relies on a complex, physica...

Would you swap your fine wine for a bottle of water? In this episode, Ravi Kurani sits down with Ana Livi , Partner at O Amazon Air Water , to discuss a water source you’ve likely never heard of: the "breath" of the Amazon trees. Deep in the rainforest, O Amazon uses Atmospheric Water Generators (AWG) to harvest humidity from the "Flying Rivers" of the Amazon, creating a luxury...

Is climate mitigation just an expensive burden for water utilities? Alexis de Kerchove (Senior Director, Client Sustainability at Xylem) argues the opposite: the path to Net Zero is actually the key to operational efficiency and cost savings. In this episode, Ravi Kurani and Alexis de Kerchove break down how digital tools and machine learning are revolutionizing the water sector. We explore the &q...

Is there a safe level of "forever chemicals" in your water? PFAS are everywhere: from the non-stick pans in your kitchen to the contact lenses in your eyes, and even 92% of strawberries. They are the "super chemistry" that modern society relies on, but they are also a toxic legacy that refuses to break down. In this episode, Ravi Kurani sits down with Henrik Hagemann , the pota...

Ravi Kurani sits down with Gregory Holliday , Director of the 50 Liter Home Coalition , to explore how global brands and cities are redesigning the way we live — creating homes that use just 50 liters of water a day, yet feel like 500. Gregory unpacks how companies like Procter & Gamble , Kohler , IKEA , and Electrolux are uniting to make sustainability invisible — embedding efficiency into ev...

Ravi Kurani sits down with Ramzi Bouzerda , founder and CEO of Droople , to explore how the Internet of Water is turning everyday plumbing into a data-driven network. Ramzi explains how sensors measuring flow, temperature, and pressure can map “water signatures” for toilets, faucets, and filters, revealing human behavior, maintenance needs, and efficiency opportunities. He shares Droople’s origin...

In this episode of Liquid Assets , host Ravi Kurani sits down with Jose Castro , founder and CEO of Segura , to unpack how rapid diagnostics complement (not replace) lab confirmation, where multi-analyte testing pays off first—Lead & Copper Rule triage, treatment optimization, remote mining, beverage networks—and what validation and manufacturing at scale will take to make field diagnostics th...

In this episode of Liquid Assets, we dive deep into the pressing issues facing the water industry with Clara Hallgarth, an environmental engineering student. As the workforce ages and a significant number of professionals near retirement, we explore the urgent need for new talent in this vital sector. Clara shares her insights on climate resilience, the importance of education, and how technology...

Is Your Water Safe? In this episode, water engineer and SimpleLab Tap Score CEO Johnny Pujol joins host Ravi Kurani to expose what most people get wrong about tap water. From lead pipes to hidden contaminants, we dive into why government reports fall short—and how modern at-home testing is transforming the way we trust (or don’t trust) our water. Learn how Tap Score is empowering thousands to take...

Could the future of clean, reliable energy fit inside a shipping container? We sit down with nuclear physicist James Walker, CEO of Nanonuclear Energy, to explore the fascinating world of microreactors and small modular reactors (SMRs). Discover how this technology aims to power remote locations, potentially fuel AI data centers, enable desalination, and why James believes nuclear is far safer tha...

In this episode of Liquid Assets, host Ravi Kurani dives into a game-changing approach to sustainable desalination with guest Bruce Crawford , CEO and co-founder of Nona Technologies. An MIT spinout backed by the U.S. Army, Nona is pioneering a new way to turn saltwater into fresh water at any scale. At a time when many countries are investing in large-scale desalination megaprojects to combat wat...