Gradiant is a private industrial water and wastewater technology company founded at MIT and headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. It designs, builds and operates treatment systems for semiconductor fabs, data centres, power and energy installations, refineries and chemical plants, mines and pharmaceutical manufacturers, and it claims more than 3,000 treatment plants built across 92 countries. Its work is concentrated where water scarcity constrains industrial expansion, which increasingly means AI computing infrastructure and the oilfield produced-water stream of the energy industry.
From MIT research to an operating platform
The company was formed to commercialise water treatment research from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and grew from equipment design into a business that also runs customers' water plants under long-term operations and maintenance contracts. It reported over 1,300 employees worldwide in 2025. Prakash Govindan is chief executive officer, and in August 2026 the company named Nish Vora, previously a senior executive at GE Water, Suez Water Technologies and Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions, as managing director for the Americas. In May 2026 Gradiant closed a Series E financing round at a post-money valuation of 2 billion US dollars, with participation reported from Safar Partners, Hostplus Superannuation Fund and ClearVision Ventures.
What the company builds
Gradiant sells end-to-end systems rather than single units, and its proprietary processes include:
- Counterflow reverse osmosis and semi-batch reverse osmosis for high-recovery desalination and brine concentration
- Carrier gas extraction and selective contaminant extraction for resource and contaminant separation
- Free radical oxidation and Bio Infinity biological treatment for difficult industrial wastewater
- CURE branded treatment chemicals covering corrosion and scale inhibitors, biocides, antiscalants and coagulants
- SmartOps digital monitoring and control software for plant optimisation
Service lines span ultrapure water, industrial process water, wastewater recycling, minimum and zero liquid discharge, PFAS and emerging contaminant removal, and resource recovery from brine and produced water.
The 2026 order book in semiconductors and data centres
On 15 September 2026 Gradiant announced 300 million US dollars of new semiconductor contracts won since the start of the year, covering five fabrication sites in New York, Virginia, Idaho and Utah. The scope includes ultrapure water production, high-recovery wastewater treatment, local scrubber reclaim, treatment of hydrofluoric-acid wastewater and zero liquid discharge, with repeat awards including a second-phase wastewater facility at one of the largest fabs in the world and a scrubber reclaim design that recovers more than 80 per cent of feed volume and that the company had already delivered in Singapore, Taiwan and the United States. Two weeks earlier it disclosed a contract to supply a turnkey water and wastewater system, designed for zero surface discharge, to a hyperscale AI data centre campus in West Texas. In July 2026 it completed ultrapure water and water recovery systems for a 5 billion euro semiconductor plant in Dresden three months ahead of schedule.
US expansion
Alongside that commercial momentum, the company reported in August 2026 that it had opened offices in Phoenix, Syracuse and Philadelphia, launched a global innovation centre in Houston, grown its US headcount by 55 per cent year to date, and won long-term operations and maintenance work including running the ultrapure water system of a major chip manufacturer. Management has set a target of a 1 billion dollar order book in the United States alone in 2027.
Oilfield water and lithium
Gradiant's lithium business, alkaLi, has developed the EC2 process, which extracts, concentrates and converts lithium in a single integrated flow from oilfield produced water. The company announced in June 2025 that alkaLi would design, build, own and operate a commercial lithium production facility in the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, holding the equipment, land, water and mineral rights and permits, with commercial operation targeted for early 2026. Test results reported 97 per cent lithium recovery from produced water and 99.5 per cent purity for battery-grade lithium carbonate, and alkaLi signed a multi-year offtake agreement for up to 5,000 tonnes a year of battery-grade lithium carbonate with a US battery manufacturer. The group has also spun out other early-stage units and continues to serve refining, chemicals, mining and power customers with process water and wastewater treatment.