2026 is off to a great start. Our two interns, Jason and Malav, have integrated quite nicely with the team. The rest of the team is really coming into their own just as I find myself increasingly being taken away from the shop for conferences and sales visits.

For those who read past the end: a short recounting of our travels in Riyadh.

Making headway with Acwa, the worlds' largest private desalination company.

• In mid-January we signed an MOU with Acwa to evaluate, pilot, and potentially scale-up the batch desalting process. Following successful piloting, the MOU targets deployment in a 100,000 m³/day plant in 2031.

• Christine and I attended Acwa's 4th annual innovation days in Riyadh earlier this week. Quantum spoke at an innovation panel alongside the CEOs of Overview Energy and Advanced Ionics.

• Christine and I visited Acwa’s Dubai office on Friday to explain the batch desalting process to their data team.

• Thomas and Ratul would like us to deliver a desalting pilot to Acwa’s Innovation Centre in Shanghai ASAP. Thomas asked if we could have it in time for an April board meeting. We said June was more realistic.

We are encouraged by how quickly Acwa has moved. Less than three months from a conversation in early November to an MOU-signing ceremony in late January. We have submitted a pilot proposal to Acwa and hope to report back with a purchase order in February.

Other January developments:

• On January 15th, we gave our final pitch to MassCEC's InnovateMass program for a road salt remediation pilot. We asked MassCEC for a $200,000 grant and have received commitments of $70,000 in cost-share support from our Canadian partners.

• We started wet-testing of Arny, our second twin pilot system which will soon travel to southern California to treat produced water at an oil production site.

• Our viewpoint on Re-thinking small-scale and distributed systems is published in the Winter 2026 issue of IDRA Global Connections magazine.

What's coming up in February:

• I will be giving a talk at the Membrane Technology Conference in Myrtle Beach later this week. This conference is a good mix of academic and industry folks.

  • We were last at the MTC in February 2019, where my talk on batch RO received the best student paper presentation. Shortly thereafter, I returned to Cambridge and told John Lienhard that I wanted to start a company.

• On February 11, I will attend the Produced Water Society’s annual conference to pitch at their 2nd annual venture workshop.

  • This workshop is moderated and paneled by investors and is meant to give attendees an inside look at how investors evaluate investments.

• Start of pilot-testing in California. There is a lot to coordinate for this on-site test with much auxiliary equipment (chillers, pretreatment) needed. Exciting to get into the field in a real commercial setting!

How can you help?

• IP firm recommendations: we are preparing to negotiate a commercial licensing agreement on the batch RO IP with the MIT Technology Licensing Office. We welcome any recommendations for law firms with experience in this matter.

Seed round updates
We are continuing to engage with investors with some of these conversations leading towards due diligence. We plan to close this round, our first priced equity sale, by July 2026.

Our existing investors are invited to re-up their investments with the same terms as their first investment.

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

-quantum

Shawarma at 30,000 feet

Between meetings and checking out of my apartment in Riyadh, we didn’t quite leave enough time to eat dinner on Wednesday before catching our flight to Dubai.

Riyadh has a quite nice metro system which opened on December 1, 2024. We figured it would be faster to take the metro than slogging through Riyadh’s rush-hour traffic.

Getting to the airport required that we change trains 4 times (three to change lines plus one for picking up dinner). Not so easy with our luggage and trying to get into some jam-packed train cars.

We eventually learned that the Riyadh metro has first-class train cars, which we had inadvertently bought tickets for. These were much less crowded and made the rest of the trip less stressful.

Along the way we saw a massive WWE stadium. We made it through Riyadh airport’s security line in about 15 minutes, just in time for a 7pm call with Protec-Arisawa. We got to each on the plane once they turned off the seatbelt sign.