2025 Echo River Year in Review

2025 was a breakthrough year for Echo River Capital. We deployed capital into transformative water technology investments focused on Digitizing, Decentralizing, and Decarbonizing the water cycle.

The market validated our thesis with significant momentum: half of our portfolio companies have raised additional capital at meaningful markups, demonstrating strong investor and customer demand for water innovation.

Echo River's strategy of doubling down on winners is working well, with follow-on investments into Active Membranes, CREW Carbon, and Uravu Labs.

These results support our 3V approach targeting Visionary, ambitious founders, Velocity based on product-led growth, and compelling Value propositions. And we still have one more mystery investment to close before year-end—stay tuned.

We researched and published our Data Center Innovation Report, analyzing the critical intersection of AI infrastructure and water scarcity.

We published Echo River's Second Annual Impact Report based on quantitative impact metrics with six companies highlighted. In 2024, portfolio companies saved a total of over 28 million cubic meters of water, treated over 50 million cubic meters of water, and avoided 45,000 metric tons of CO2e.

Our Yale MBA summer intern developed an AI Venture Partner to assist in implementing Echo River's bespoke investment process including evaluating, diligencing and documenting Echo River's bespoke investment process.

Peter traveled widely, speaking at events including Sustainable Water Investment Summit in LA, Yale Innovation Summit in New Haven, AWWA ACE in Denver, New York Climate Week, and Kinneret Water Innovation in Israel.

Peter participated as an advisor and evaluator with Stanford Sustainability Accelerator, Yale Ventures ClimateHaven Water Innovation Hub, and Gener8tor Great Lakes Innovation Accelerator.

Looking to 2026, we will be raising Echo River Fund II deepening the focus on data center cooling, AI and remote sensing. We'll continue investing at inception-to-seed stage in transformative water technologies, with larger initial checks and concentrated ownership positions. 

Echo River’s achievements this year would not have been possible without the exceptional contributions of our talented team. We are deeply grateful to our associates—Ojaswi Atrey, Clara Drysdale, Eli Ratner, Shan Bachhu, Clelia Poujade, and Ioana Solomon—for their dedication and hard work. We also extend our sincere thanks to expert advisors Peter Fiske, Paul Fleming, Meagan Leitch, and Peter Wijsman for their invaluable guidance, to our co-investors for sharing their perspectives and referrals, and to our incredibly supportive LPs for their continued trust and partnership.

As always, thank you and best holiday wishes.

Here's to living with clean, abundant water,

Peter Yolles, Founder & General Partner

Echo River Capital PBC