At 3 a.m., running out of water is not an option for a hospital. Dialysis and sterilization machines depend on uninterrupted supply. A data center is no different as cooling systems break down quickly if water isn’t there. In both cases, water is treated as a given. Until it isn’t.
Researchers, engineers, and operators have spent decades figuring out how to use less water, with new technologies and techniques coming online to help meet infrastructure challenges across the developing and developed worlds. While the benefits have been tangible, the results have been paradoxical: the more effectively water scarcity has been managed, the easier it has become to confuse resilience with abundance.
Our investment in AquaPoro Technologies Inc. (“AquaPoro”), an adsorption-driven Atmospheric Water Generation (AWG) platform, is underpinned by a belief that the next decade may require figuring out how to create more of it. Like power only a few years ago, water’s role is increasingly moving from a mostly unseen background utility to a strategic input playing a key role in where and how growth can occur. It is becoming more noticeable precisely because its absence is starting to matter.
We believe this shift changes the solution set and that we’ll need to add net new water supply. This led us to AquaPoro, whose platform generates water from air at industrial scale.
Why Now?
The water market has entered a new phase where extraction-focused production or stretching existing supply alone is not a guaranteed answer for many regions and industrial markets, particularly when it comes to greenlighting new projects.
Demand is rising across advanced manufacturing, semiconductors, data centers, food and beverage, chemicals, and healthcare, just as new water permits have effectively come to a halt across tightly regulated groundwater zones and over-drafted basins.
Burnt Island Ventures captured the scale of the opportunity well in a recent memo, calling water a “trillion-dollar industry hiding in plain sight” and pointing to aging infrastructure, escalating water challenges, and increasing demand driven by AI, cloud computing, and semiconductor manufacturing. We agree that water is becoming a core infrastructure constraint rather than a niche sustainability category.
Why AquaPoro?
AWGs that pull moisture from the atmosphere aren’t a new phenomenon, but older machines demanded more power, required certain materials, or were only able to operate in humid regions. So without demand or a clear repeatable solution, traditional AWGs were kept on the fringes. Today, growing pressure on traditional systems and incremental gains in technology have created a backdrop that is more receptive to alternatives.
AquaPoro’s approach is to build a scaled platform that is agnostic to geographies and materials, and one designed to evolve alongside advances in the field while making use of heat that would otherwise go to waste, helping lower the cost of producing water from air.
We believe in the real and growing need for a platform like AquaPoro, and we see co-founders determined to deliver on it in Kyle Cordova and Kris Gilman.
Kyle is a highly cited chemist whose work contributed to Nobel-winning research and an operator with a style akin to a seasoned mechanic. He is someone who has looked at a hundred broken engines, knows exactly why each one failed, and can tell you, without much fluff, how he’d fix yours.
He spent years working on water challenges in places like Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Southeast Asia, where good intentions and promising technologies often ran into practical realities or limits. He brings a refreshing realism about the scale of the challenge as well as a real belief that the problem is solvable.
Kris is the counterbalance. They’ve known each other since they were kids but went in different directions. Kyle stayed deep in science. Kris went out and built real, infrastructure-heavy businesses in environments where things had to work on time and at scale. That shows up in their methodical mindset about AquaPoro. They’re not carried away with breakthroughs, but instead working toward something that needs to be deployed, sold, and durably relied on.
That combination is what gave us conviction: someone who has spent a decade understanding why solutions fail, paired with someone who knows how to make one work, underpinned by real science.
What’s Next?
Kyle and Kris are focused on industrial customers that need dependable water supply in places where existing options are becoming slower, more expensive, or less reliable. The near-term opportunity is to prove that a net new water source can be deployable and valuable in real operating environments.
Over time, we expect the opportunity will be much larger. Infrastructure-heavy customers are increasingly forcing a closer connection between water, energy, and resilience. As that pattern extends across industrial markets, water supply will become a more visible constraint on growth, and customers will need more flexible ways to meet it.
Final Thoughts
Water scarcity will not be solved by a single technology. AquaPoro takes that view and is already working tirelessly to lead a new generation of water infrastructure that is diversified, customizable to regions and needs, and redundant.
We are thrilled to back Kyle, Kris, and the AquaPoro team in their mission.
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