Inc. Magazine’s feature on the founders solving AI’s biggest infrastructure bottlenecks puts Gradiant at the center of the story on water.
The piece traces Gradiant back to a formative memory: co-founder and CEO Prakash Govindan running out to meet a government water truck as a teenager during Chennai’s water shortages in the 1990s. That experience shaped his path through an MIT PhD in engineering and, in 2013, the founding of Gradiant alongside fellow MIT alumnus Anurag Bajpayee. The company’s original technology, including carrier gas extraction, was built for the oil and gas industry. Today, that same technology underpins a different economy entirely.
As Prakash puts it in the piece, Gradiant was unintentionally built to be the perfect vehicle to service the five layers of the AI economy: chips, data centers, energy, models, and applied AI. Those five layers now account for most of Gradiant’s revenue today — a shift the article credits to Gradiant’s willingness to take on problems other companies won’t touch.
Steven Lam, Head of Technology, explains why: chip fabricators bring ultrapure water needs and waste streams so complex that almost all of Gradiant’s technology goes into solving them. For data centers, where most water use goes toward cooling, Gradiant’s answer is to change the water source itself, drawing on seawater, brackish water, or wastewater instead of relying on a single supply.
Read the full story on Inc. com: https://www.inc.com/chloe-aiello/data-centers-have-problems-these-founders-positioned-their-companies-to-become-the-solutions/913