Our entire technical team has gone to Singapore and returned home safely. We were there from June 11-24 to reassemble and commission Searay. We also took the opportunity to visit some contract manufacturers in China. See below for a deeper dive, but first some other important updates:

Updates

• Submitted a quotation for our first inbound inquiry. On June 4, an engineering firm in Texas reached out for a quotation of a small (10 gpm) RO system as well as estimate of accompanying brine pond sizes and construction costs. We submitted our quotation on June 20 and are awaiting a response. According to our estimates, choosing batch RO would reduce up-front costs (desalination skid + brine pond) by 45% compared to regular RO.

  • The engineers were interested in Harmony’s ability to reduce brine volumes and their associated costs. They were straightforward and level-headed about the need to further vet our technology but open to trying it out if the economics penciled out.

  • We came up with our own cost estimates internally. Desalination skid costs were later confirmed by a system integrator who we had reached out to in regards to building larger (>100 gpm) systems. We will see how we did on the brine pond costs.

• Qualified for XPRIZE Water Scarcity. Our umbrella team, Renaissance Water, has qualified for XPRIZE Water Scarcity. We will receive a cash prize of ~$36k and will now be expected to submit our qualified test data by December 19, 2025. Of the ~90 qualifying teams, 20 will move on to the semifinals.

  • We will use data from either a factory acceptance test of our BoR DWPR skids or upcoming tests in Saudi Arabia to fulfill this requirement. We will exceed both the targeted volume (0.18 gpm) and the targeted uptime (30%) by a large margin: our uptime was 92% during the week-long More Water less Concentrate Challenge in 2022.

  • Competition guidelines: “[Qualifying] teams will continuously operate their integrated systems in their chosen test location, generating a volume of 1 m³/d (1,000 liters per day) over two weeks, at 30% uptime.”

• Signed an option agreement extension with the MIT Technology Licensing Office. At long last, this agreement has been signed so we retain the exclusive option to negotiate a commercial license with MIT regarding the batch RO IP. We will commence negotiations once we receive further investment, which is something they would like to see.

• Joined Greentown Labs. With Fuasto + Rishabh needing a home base and impending commercialization & fundraising, we joined Greentown Labs this month. Greentown is the largest climatetech incubator in the world. We anticipate their ecosystem, network, and resources will boost our efforts. We are retaining our space in Chelsea to assemble pilot systems as well as memberships to Artisans Asylum.

Harmony visits Asia

Gradiant gave us a limited budget to send a crew over for commissioning. Initially, they meant for us to send two people for five days of start-up, which we knew would not suffice. We ended up sending six people and worked a cumulative 37 person-days for a successful start-up. We used their entire budget and dipped into some of our own funds to send the team over. Some notes:

• Staggered travel schedule: Martin, Kevin, and I flew over first in order to re-assemble Searay and commence with the initial testing. Jenny, Quinton, and Christine joined the following week.

  • This helped to extend our start-up timeline to nearly two weeks while keeping costs down. We were also able to book flights for the later half after we had more certainty regarding Searay’s status (i.e. customs clearance and damage). Finally, we were able to ask Jenny to bring over some items we had forgotten to pack.

• Valuable experience: This was the first system start-up for Jenny, Quinton, and Martin — so they certainly learned a lot. It was also a good chance for our technical team to have some face-time with Christine (our CTO), who is not currently allowed to travel to the US for Harmony. This was a nice culminating trip for a team who has just come together this calendar year. Finally, we did take some time off to explore Singapore (see photos below).

• China factory visits: The larger scale-up demonstration scheduled for later this year requires that we move from 8” diameter bladders to 16” diameter bladders. This is a crucial step towards our scale-up in general and the capital costs (i.e. mold tooling) are being covered by this Gradiant project. Alex and Seun identified three potential vendors who I visited from June 18-20 as part of our due diligence. We are awaiting final quotes and will move forward with manufacturing in July.

  • Whirlwind trip: To visit four factories in three days required two red-eyes, navigating Beijing’s subway system, several high-speed rail tickets, and many hours in the car. I credit the success of this trip to:

    • My parents’ insistence that we learn Mandarin. I was pleasantly surprised by how well we could communicate despite the lack of English.

    • Prior factory experience from my summers at Microsoft (Xbox): I was already familiar with the dynamic between contract manufacturers and their customers.

  • Bonus factory visit: While in Singapore, Martin found a quote from a Chinese factory for a solar-powered shipping container for our upcoming Mesquite project. The factory was located conveniently to my last visit so we got Martin over there as well and anticipate moving forward with an order next week. This will save our team a lot of work and also save some budget on our BoR Pitch to pilot project.

• Logistics engineering: To ensure we did not waste time, we only departed the States once we received confirmation that Searay had cleared Singapore customs. Traveling to China was no small feat. Due to some poor planning, I had to apply for my 10-year commercial visa while in Singapore. Martin flew back to Singapore via Taiwan to qualify for China’s visa-free transit policy. Martin’s return flight to the States (on the 24th through Qatar) was cancelled due to the recent attack. We booked him on a return flight over the Pacific to get him back without too much delay.

All in all, the trip occurred largely without incident. We are back and working on our other pilot systems. Significant efforts towards business development and marketing continue.

-quantum