AquaPoro Raises $5M to Advance Technology that Generates Net New Water from Air
Cleantech San Diego company and Southern California Energy Innovation Network (SCEIN) company AquaPoro Technologies Inc., a deep tech startup engineering a new class of industrial water infrastructure, today announced the close of a $5 million seed financing. The round was led by Breakout Ventures with participation from Cerberus Ventures, Humba Ventures, and One Small Planet. Proceeds will accelerate manufacturing scale-up and the deployment of AquaPoro’s first commercial pilot installations.
AquaPoro’s technology addresses a structural crisis constraining global industry: the assumption of infinite freshwater supply has created an $8.8 trillion infrastructure bottleneck as reserves deplete and regulatory discharge penalties climb. While Atmospheric Water Generators (AWGs) have emerged as promising alternatives to slow, heavily regulated municipal systems, most are limited by environmental constraints and unreliable, intermittent output. AquaPoro’s proprietary Atmospheric Low-humidity Moisture Adsorption (ALMA™) technology extracts clean water from ambient air at lower energy and cost, regardless of temperature or humidity. ALMA operates in a continuous-flow process for uninterrupted production, and its modular Stream™ systems integrate directly into manufacturing facilities, leveraging waste and ambient energy already on-site to eliminate grid-intensive operations.
“I spent a decade experiencing and then working on water scarcity across the world, and the lesson was simple: you cannot conserve your way out of a shortage, you have to find a way to make net new water,” said Kyle Cordova, Founder and CEO of AquaPoro. “ALMA makes net new water from the air at conditions where conventional systems break down, such that a factory can produce its own supply instead of fighting over a shrinking one.”
AquaPoro is set to break ground on the world’s first continuous-flow atmospheric water harvesting system at UC Riverside in partnership with the College of Engineering’s Center for Environmental Research and Technology (CE-CERT). This significant improvement in capacity has already drawn commercial interest from a leading national beverage manufacturer and a large multi-national water treatment and sustainability leader.
“Water is the most basic and valuable asset, yet the unit economics of industrial water supply have been broken for decades,” said Lindy Fishburne, Managing Partner at Breakout Ventures. “The moment we met the AquaPoro team and recognized their unique positioning to scale this technology, we knew we wanted to be involved in bringing it to the market.”
About AquaPoro (www.aquaporo.com) AquaPoro engineers scalable atmospheric water systems that operate below the humidity threshold of conventional systems, with dramatically lower energy costs. From residential units to industrial-scale arrays, AquaPoro builds decentralized infrastructure that turns air into ultra-pure water.
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