Focus Area
Sustainability
Cleantech, water and the circular economy. The fund backs companies whose product is a physical result — water produced or recovered, material returned to production, energy or emissions taken out of a process — priced against what the customer pays today rather than against a subsidy or a pledge.
What we back.
- Water
- Desalination, treatment, reuse and recovery, leak detection and network efficiency — equipment, membranes, chemistry and controls, judged on energy per cubic meter, recovery rate and what it costs to keep running in hard water and high heat.
- Industrial decarbonization
- Heat, cooling, process efficiency and emissions control inside plants that will exist either way — cement, aluminum, chemicals, food, logistics — where the unit of progress is energy or emissions per ton produced.
- Materials and the circular economy
- Sorting, recovery and reprocessing that put a material back into production at a specification a manufacturer will accept, across plastics, metals, textiles, batteries and construction waste, where the economics turn on purity and on who already holds the feedstock.
- Measurement and verification
- Sensing, metering and the data behind a claim about water, waste or emissions, built to the standard an auditor, a regulator or a customer's procurement team will test it against rather than to the one a report prefers.
Why now
Why this sector, in this corridor, now.
The buyer changed. What was once bought by a sustainability office as a commitment is now bought by operations as a cost line, because water, energy, waste and compliance each became expensive enough to appear in a plant's own budget. That shift favors engineering companies and exposes narrative ones: the question is what the system produces or saves per unit, measured on real feedstock, and what it costs to run for a year.
Water is the clearest version of it across the United States, the UAE and MENA. The region desalinates at a scale that exists almost nowhere else, is rebuilding treatment and reuse as its cities grow, and treats every kilowatt-hour per cubic meter as a line someone is accountable for; the American Southwest is working through the same arithmetic against a shrinking supply. The constraint is physical, the buyers are utilities and industrial operators, and the improvement is measured in units nobody argues about.
What we look for
What a company in this area has to show.
The five criteria in How We Invest apply to every opportunity. These are the questions this area adds on top of them.
A result in physical units
Cubic meters, tons, kilowatt-hours, parts per million — measured on real water or real feedstock at a real site, with the energy, consumables and downtime the system needed to get there reported alongside it.
Economics that stand without the subsidy
A payback the customer would accept if the incentive disappeared tomorrow. An incentive can accelerate a good system; it cannot carry one, and a company built on a policy it does not control has priced a risk it cannot manage.
Who owns the feedstock, and on what terms
Waste streams, brine, heat and used material all belong to someone, and the contract that secures them at a known quality is usually the real asset. A process with no supply agreement is a laboratory result with a business plan attached.
Durability in the conditions it will meet
Fouling, scaling, heat, dust, contamination and the maintenance the customer will realistically perform, with hours on a working site rather than a clean trial, and a service model that assumes the equipment is sometimes neglected.
Across the corridor
Why the corridor matters here.
Water, waste and industrial heat are local problems with the same physics everywhere, which is why a proven system travels faster here than in most sectors. The UAE and the wider MENA region operate desalination and reuse at a scale that exists almost nowhere else, which makes them both a demanding test and a reference that is read globally; the American Southwest meets the same scarcity under different regulation and a different cost of energy. A company that proves a recovery rate or an energy figure on one side can usually be evaluated on the other without starting the evidence again. What has to be arranged deliberately is everything around it: certification for equipment that touches drinking water, service and spares near the plant, and offtake or disposal terms that survive a change in regulation. The fund is built to treat those as part of the investment rather than as the company's problem afterwards.
What that support consists of in practice is set out under Capital + Capability, and how the markets are covered under Global Network.
Next
Building in Sustainability?
Founders in the United States, the UAE and MENA can submit their company for review, or read how the fund decides first.