Happy New Year! This is a jam-packed update as we have had a busy month and are also including some reflections on the year.

Three highlights:

• Finished our XPRIZE testing with 98% uptime

• Published our first catalog for seawater RO solutions

• Dabbled in film-making with our first team video production

For those who read through the end, we’ve got a fun story about our impromptu late-night team-building exercise (and workout).

How far we’ve come
A picture is worth a thousand word so to show our 2025 progress, here is a photo of our Chelsea workshop shortly after moving in this January:

Compare to this video recorded on December 18, a required piece of our qualified team’s submission to the XPRIZE Water Scarcity Contest:

More important than building out our space, we have beefed up our team this year:

• Officially welcomed Christine to the team as our co-founder and CTO.

• Martin and Quinton joined our Boston-based crew in January. Totally new to the industry, these two (and Jenny) have now designed, built, and commissioned multiple batch RO systems.

• Elyse joined us in November, providing an extra brain and pair of hands.

Our team has grown incredibly during 2026 and we are well-equipped to sell, build and deliver more systems in 2026.

What we’ve accomplished in December

• Fielding commercial inquiries regarding projects across North America, MENA, SE Asia, and Australia. More to come as these projects materialize.

• The team is nearly finished assembling our first set of control and power boxes. Controls will be a key piece of our business so it’s important for us to build this expertise.

• Submitted our final report for our Qualified Team Testing for XPRIZE Water Scarcity’s Track A.

  • We met our goal and finished the two weeks of team testing with 98% uptime! Most of this downtime was not process related. For more on this, scroll to the end.

• At the request of a client, we put together a catalog of our seawater solutions. More to come in the new year on for groundwater and industrial applications.

What we’re up to in January

• We are on track to deploy our twin RO systems to a commercial oil-field (owned by California’s 5th largest producer) for a six-month pilot funded in part by the Bureau of Reclamation.

  • Produced water treatment in California is our path to revenue in 2026. The difficulty in disposing produced water is limiting producers’ output: wells are sitting idle.

  • We will also use our factory acceptance test (FAT) to run a study on silica scaling, a thorny issue for brackish desalination plants.

• Christine and I will attend ACWA Power’s Innovation Days in Riyadh. I will speak at the “Step Change in Innovation” session.

  • Depending on how you measure, ACWA Power is the largest (or second largest) plant developer in the world. Gross capacity: 10 million m3/day, equity capacity: ~4.5 million m3/day

• We will welcome two interns, Jason and Malav, during the first week of January. These two will help us as we start to work on Mesquite, our solar-powered desalting container.

What’s coming up in 2026

• Later in Q1, we will commission a small seawater pilot for a 3-month test with the Saudi Water Authority.

  • Saudi Water Authority is the largest public developer of desalination plants. Equity capacity: ~8 million m3/day.

• The big focus is on our scale-up to a 1,000 m3/day seawater plant, a critical demonstration for our applicability for municipal seawater RO plants (ranging from 10,000-1,000,000 m3/day). We will travel to Singapore in Q1 for commissioning.

• Mesquite is the last of our in-progress pilots. In 2026 we will hear back on a couple of outstanding grants (New Mexico and MassCEC). We will apply again to the Texas Water Development Board.

• We will close our seed round of financing and execute our option with the MIT Technology Licensing office to negotiate a commercial license on the batch RO IP.

• We will close our first commercial projects in 2026.

Thanks and asks
None of this would be possible without your assistance. As we venture into 2026, we ask for your continued support. Please continue to:

• Share your feedback

• Connect us to customers and potential hires

• Introduce us to investors

As always, reach out if you have any questions, connections, or suggestions.
-quantum

Martin’s bucket brigade
It was Day 8 of our XPRIZE testing. The first week of testing was mostly uneventful. To demonstrate the varied capabilities of our system, we switched to high flux operations during Week 2. After reaching stable operations, Martin and I left shortly after 6pm.

9:03pm. I missed a call from Martin shortly after dropping him off for a meeting with the MIT Outing Club.

Disaster had struck! Through our remote monitoring Jenny had noticed that Danny had stopped running. Martin caught a ride back to Chelsea and discovered we had lost all of our water. A hose on our tank-mixing pump (added earlier that day) had come loose and spilled water all over the facility. Getting more seawater would be tricky with the equipment we had on hand, because it was low tide:

9:42pm Quinton was next on the scene and I was on the way. It was too late to make it to Home Depot and buy a second sump pump to make the job easier. We realize the simplest way to get Danny back up and going (to preserve our uptime) was to carry the water by hand. We started hauling water, with Jenny arriving to help out shortly afterwards.

11:04pm By this point we had refilled our feed tank, cleaned up the spilled water and got the system back up and running. We were out the door and headed home by around 11:30, to be back the next day (with a later start).