BIV Monthly Update L (L!)

Written By Tom Ferguson

BIV Monthly Update – December 10, 2024

“Yeah I’m still here. Unless you wanna open the front door for me.” John McLane, Die Hard

Highlights

  • Not technically November, but it’s our newsletter so - a massive welcome to the Burnt Island to Flocean. Here’s why we did it. A superb company in the making, that just nails the issues with legacy desalination. Alexander and the team have serious game. So excited they let us be a part of it.  

  • Great board meetings with Cala, ZwitterCo, Aquatic Labs, Subeca and more this month. Endlessly fascinating to watch really smart people work through the stages of building companies. Hopefully we help a bit, not just watch.

  • Particularly pleased for Bessie and the team at Floodbase who had some rather good news this month. They have been absolutely exemplary of the benefits of staying in sequence - sensible, patient, relentless company building. Bravo.

  • Lovely to take Kiyan to New Orleans for Thanksgiving. Something a little different, and delicious. He wants to go back. So do we.

December Asks

BIV Portfolio Updates

Seed I

  • Irrigreen – Gearing up to release their V3 in 2025 with significant improvements. Steve spent time with the team at the facility in MN and Tom saw Shane in NYC. Impressive indeed.

  • LAIIER – Announced their partnership with Conserv for early water leak detection in cultural heritage institutions. This close to closing their round. Top work from Matt. 

  • NLine Energy – Onboarded a 20-yr energy veteran as the Chief Commercial Officer. Read more here. A fairly stonking Q4 inbound.

  • SewerAI – Hosted the first SewerAI University session taking a deep dive into the CSV upload feature in Pioneer and showcased how it can simplify pre-fill and bulk corrections. Great case-study from the City of Phoenix in Trenchless Technology.

  • Shower Stream – Close tracking of performance and customer satisfaction indicates strong performance of the showerhead. Deck and data are excellent, $1m to fill. 

  • Spout – Ironing out the kinks ahead of the first full run. More $ secured, a little more to go.

  • SwiftComply – Strong show at the Fall Pretreatment/FOG Workshop in Arizona. Great video on how they tackle challenges with CROMERR for industrial pre-treatment.

  • Ziptility – Joined a panel at the BAMI-I (Buried Asset Management Institute-International). Great shows with the Alliance of Indiana Rural Water - AIRW conference and the Water Institute and Equipment Expo.

  • ZwitterCo – Achieved NSF 61 certification for their high rejection and low energy BWRO membranes (I don’t need to tell you how big a deal that is). Take a look at this blog post on tightening regulations around efficient wastewater management in the food & beverage industry - the market is deepening.

  • 2S Water – Named to Foresight Canada’s 2024 #Foresight50 list. Anthea named to the the TOOL 500 Female Founders. Gearing up for the seed raise, and the argument is excellent.

  • Aclarity –  Hosted their first team summit in their new HQ. Joined the DoD Energy and Environment Innovation Symposium and the Virtual Environmental Conference

  • Aquafortus – Successfully ran the pilot plant end-to-end 100% remote. Multiple majors on site in the last two weeks. Technical progress continues to be remarkable. $3-$5m round opening ($1.5m committed), 

  • Beagle Services - Featured speaker at a broker partner continuing education seminar hosted by Chubb.

  • CivilGrid – Joining the Association of California Water Agencies Fall Conference and Expo this week. Josh has done a good job on GtM this month.

  • Daupler – On target for both EOY ARR and Sales Funnel. Series B complete. John hit by the dreaded lurgy.

  • Floodbase – Provided a historical catalog of flood data dating back more than two decades covering all of sub-Saharan Africa for the production of a new report released during COP29 from The Malaria Atlas Project and Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Check it out here.

Seed II

  • HOPE Hydration – Hit over a million water refills. Great post from Jorge. Nice highlight on Airport Improvement on how their refill stations are changing travel at MSP.

  • TeamSolve – Concentrating on pilot conversion, the data is starting to look really nice. On track for revenue targets.  

  • AquaticLabs - Doubling down on their eDNA Puffer strategy. Strong work moving the product through QA and MFD process and into manufacturing.

  • Cala - World class argument for Seed II. Adding 100 registrants & pre-orders per day. Great episode with the Hardware to Save a Planet podcast. Tune in here.

  • Subeca - 2024 IoT Evolution Edge Computing Excellence Award. Check out their hilarious Hallmark-inspired movie for water utilities - Meter in Holly Creek.

  • Work with the Burnt Islanders

  • All open roles with the Burnt Islanders are advertised through the BIV Jobs Board which is accessible here

OF I

  • Aqua Membranes - Outstanding update on the State of the Business in 2024. Well worth a watch.  Steve visited the new site in TN, and holy smokes. 

  • Daupler - On target for both EOY ARR and Sales Funnel. Series B complete. John still hit by the dreaded lurgy. 

Company Pipeline

  • Overall Pipeline: 1422 (+46)

  • Strong investment prospects in grey infrastructure and utility optimization software - segments that will always be important. Problems there are big, obvious, and expensive, so we like them a lot.

  • PFAS is still attracting smart founders and the market is getting stronger by the day in Europe, and we’ll be watching the regulatory landscape on this side of the pond closely over the coming months. An interesting conundrum. 

  • Investments 7, 8, and 9 from Fund II confirmed and closing shortly, and investment 3 for the Opp Fund moving that way. This is turning into a really interesting group of companies, and what a pleasure to work on behalf of these founders. 

Team

  • We bid adieu to our wonderful colleague Kane who moves on to a new EA role with Athena. Thanks for everything!

  • ENORMOUS congratulations to Jessica who organised - and spoke at - the SF Symphony’s packed “Deck the Hall” event as a side gig on Sunday. Legend. Raised a TON. 

BIV Insight/Visibility

  • If you'd like to hear more about upcoming BIV events, please register here.

We’re Reading/Listening/Watching

  • This episode of The Knowledge Project podcast on how to tell a good story. We need to be doing more of this in water.

  • The Colossus Review - the magazine is great, best thing I’ve read in ages. But the pod with Graham Duncan is extraordinary - on the level of Poor Charlie’s Almanack. He also has a Paul-Graham-levels-of-simple-aesthetics blog with very few, but very high quality entries. 

  • All but Two US States Are in Drought from the New York Times. Climate change is here and the effects are real. Maybe we’re figuring out we should react.

  • This article on how AI will disrupt SaaS sales models. We’ll be doing a deep dive with companies on this one shortly.

  • Zero to One celebrated it’s tenth birthday. If you haven’t read it, you sort of have to.

  • Worth reading Ed Zitron on why “mainstream” AI may be teetering given the slowing of marginal improvements from model to model. He’s generally an enormously entertaining voice, but not sure he covers all the boring and practical transformations that will infuse every business, even if OpenAI can never find the profitability inflection it has promised to the tune of billions.   

Things to Work On

  • I really need to run more - only way to deal with the stress. It’s been a tough one, but I think that if we can do what we need to by the end of January, it will feel like Aladdin and Jasmine. Comparatively, anyway. 

  • Continue to work really hard on behalf of the Burnt Islanders. All things flow from that. 

Thanks so much as ever. See you on the other side of the tinsel.

Tom Ferguson
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Why We Invested in Flocean