AKVO Pulls Drinking Water From Air at Rs 2.5 a Litre

Ask most founders in climate tech why they started, and you get a story. A village that ran dry. A grandmother walking kilometres with a pot. Navkaran Singh Bagga, founder and CEO of AKVO Atmospheric Water Systems, offers no such thing. He got into water because he thought there was money in it. Nine years and 16 countries later, that unsentimental starting point turns out to be the most useful thing about him — because it produced a company that argues, loudly, that green solutions which cost more than the dirty ones deserve to fail.

AKVO builds atmospheric water generators. The machines pull humidity out of the air and turn it into drinking water, at a running cost of roughly two and a half to five rupees a litre. It sounds like alchemy. Bagga's first move in any conversation is to strip the magic out of it.

A Kolkata Trader Who Went Looking for a Sector

Bagga is a third-generation Kolkata boy — schooled in the city, university in the UK, back home in 2007 to join the family business in international trade and exports. Over 19 years he's run a hotel business and bought a steel company and turned it around. None of that is a water story. It's the CV of someone comfortable buying into unglamorous industries and fixing them.

By 2016 he wanted to move into clean tech, and he went looking for the least crowded room in the building.

What he found when he started researching was that almost everyone working on water in India was working on the same two things: filtration and sewage treatment. Both take water that already exists and make it usable again. Nobody was chasing an alternate source.

Two companies abroad were. EcoloBlue in the United States, probably the first to seriously push atmospheric water generation as a category — it has since shut down. And Watergen, the Israeli company that remains the best-known name in the space. That was the whole field.

The clincher was a movie. Bagga was watching The Big Short, and stayed for the end credits — the card explaining that Michael Burry, the investor who called the subprime housing collapse, had since put his money into exactly one commodity: water.

He's refreshingly direct about what followed. There was no epiphany, no personal hardship driving it.

The Technology Is Class Four Science

Founders in deep tech usually inflate the difficulty of what they've built. Bagga does the opposite.

The core of atmospheric water generation, he says, is condensation — the thing you were taught in about class four. Air holds water as vapour. Cool a surface below the dew point and that vapour turns back into liquid. Nature does it every morning: dew on grass, dew on car windshields. AKVO's machines simply force the process, using more or less the same components as a refrigerator.

Where the engineering actually lives, he concedes, is in the nuances: how energy-efficient you can make the unit, how small you can shrink it, how much water you can wring out per unit of power. That's nine years of iteration, not a physics breakthrough. And it's an honest framing that most hardware founders wouldn't risk.

"But Indian Air Is Filthy" — the Question He Gets Every Time

If you're extracting water from air, and the air is polluted, doesn't the pollution come along for the ride? Bagga says the question comes up constantly, and the answer is layered: the air filter stops the heavy stuff before it enters, active purification catches what slips through, and activated carbon deals with anything molecular.

His proof point is field data rather than a lab claim. An older AKVO system was run inside a refinery — about as hostile an air environment as India offers — and it never failed a water test.

The Real Product Isn't Water. It's Not Wasting Any.

The environmental argument for AKVO isn't the one you'd expect. It isn't that air is a magical free resource. It's that every alternative quietly destroys water on the way to giving you some.

Bagga calls it "on-point water generation" — clean water produced where it's consumed, with nothing wasted in the making. For a corporate campus, that's not just an ESG line item. It's insulation from a supply chain that's getting less reliable every year.

There's a limit he states plainly: AKVO is an urban solution. The systems run on electricity and need power continuity, which rules out most of rural and semi-rural India. He isn't pretending otherwise, and that self-imposed boundary is part of what makes the rest of his case credible.

India's Real Water Problem Is an Attitude Problem

Ask Bagga about contamination and he'll tell you Indians have largely made peace with it.

Water-borne disease, in other words, is treated as a cost of living rather than a failure. People only get pushy when the tap runs dry. Availability moves markets; quality doesn't. It's a bleak read, and anyone who has watched a housing society debate a purifier upgrade versus a tanker contract will recognise it as accurate.

Which is why AKVO's opening in India is scarcity, not safety — and scarcity is arriving on schedule. Societies in Bengaluru, Gurugram, Chennai and Mumbai are already buying tankers daily. As Bagga puts it, the issue we're speculating about is happening right now.

It's a different wedge from the one other water startups have used. DrinkPrime built a subscription model around affordable purification for urban households, and Boon has gone after IoT-enabled sustainable purifiers — both improving water that already reaches the tap. AKVO's bet is on the customers for whom the tap itself is the problem.

Rs 100 a Litre in a Restaurant, Rs 2.5 From the Air

The economics are where Bagga gets genuinely animated, because he thinks water is the most badly mispriced thing in the economy.

Notice that at the top end of AKVO's range, the pitch is cost parity, not savings. Bagga's argument there is about what you get for the same money: continuity of supply, no rejected water, no delivery truck. And the jar comparison is worse for the jar than it looks, because producing that jar through an RO consumed considerably more input water than what ends up inside it.

But parity isn't the obstacle. Psychology is.

That mentality decided AKVO's customer strategy for it. Roughly 99% of AKVO's customers are large corporates — organisations that already carry water as a line item, can price continuity, and want an ESG story they can stand behind. Individuals were a different matter. AKVO kept a domestic product on the market for about five years and discontinued it on 31 December 2025, having concluded it was a waste of time and effort chasing acceptability that wasn't coming.

Killing a five-year-old product line is not a decision most founders announce on a podcast. He mentions it as an operating fact.

Water On Want: Stop Selling Machines, Start Selling Litres

The strategic shift of the last three years is a model called WOW — Water On Want. Instead of asking a company to buy a capital asset, AKVO installs the systems at no upfront cost, owns and operates them, and bills the customer per litre consumed.

WOW is live in Chennai, Bengaluru and Mumbai, with Gujarat expected to follow. It's the model Bagga wants to build the company's future on, and the ambition behind it is specific.

That's a meaningfully different business from manufacturing hardware. A machine sale is a transaction. A utility is a metered relationship that compounds — and it's the same trajectory the smarter energy and infrastructure startups have followed, trading one-time margin for recurring revenue and much stickier customers.

The Founder Who Doesn't Want a Subsidy

Here's where Bagga breaks ranks with almost everyone in Indian climate tech. Asked about government incentives — the standard ask of any early clean-tech sector — he cut the question off.

His evidence is the EV market. FAME I, FAME II, assorted subsidies — and, in his reading, none of it moved the needle. People didn't buy electric vehicles because of a subsidy. They bought when the market was ready. His analogy for how policy actually arrives is Uber: ride-hailing scaled with no policy framework at all, and governments only wrote the rules once enough people were already using it.

The deeper objection is about risk. Build your business case on a policy and you've handed a stranger the power to end it.

By his own account the thesis is being validated. Three consecutive years of year-on-year growth, no incentive scheme involved. After nine years, he says, the market is finally ready.

The Data Centre Question He Refuses to Exploit

Data centres are the easiest money in Indian infrastructure storytelling right now. They consume enormous volumes of water for cooling, everyone knows it, and any water-tech founder would be forgiven for claiming the segment. Bagga interrupted the question to disqualify himself from it.

His reasoning is arithmetic. Data centres spend electricity to manage heat. An AKVO machine also spends electricity to make water. Substituting one for the other doesn't balance — you've moved the load, not reduced it. So AKVO is not the solution for data centres, and he says so without hedging.

What he does claim is the second-order opportunity: the neighbourhoods, businesses and communities that suffer because a data centre nearby is drawing down the water table and straining the grid. For them, an independent on-site source means not having to worry about continuity at all.

It's a striking thing to say out loud in 2026. It also makes everything else he claims easier to believe.

Sixteen Countries, and Ninety Percent of Sales Abroad

The number that reframes AKVO: systems are running in 16 countries, and 90% of sales come from outside India — almost entirely capital machine sales. The Indian OPEX business, the one he's most excited about, is currently the smaller half.

The expansion plan is to replicate WOW wherever it's geographically viable inside India, then export the model to the Middle East and Southeast Asia — markets where AKVO already has hardware on the ground and, crucially, the humidity to run it.

And no, richer countries are not the easier sell. Asked whether developed markets are more receptive, Bagga was blunt: plenty of companies tried to push atmospheric water generation in the US, and everybody shut shop. He mentioned that on the morning of the interview a banker had emailed him about a slump sale of a competitor — a company that, by his account, had raised $250 million in this space and was now available for pennies on the dollar because there was nothing left. That's his characterisation of the deal, not an audited fact, but the pattern he draws from it is one worth taking seriously.

Why Enterprises Buy Early and Consumers Buy Late

The strategy of going after enterprises first isn't only about budgets. Bagga's explanation is about how the two kinds of buyer think.

Large companies run business continuity planning as a discipline. Someone's job is to ask what happens if the water supply fails, and to have an answer before it does. That makes them structurally forward-looking. Individuals, he argues, are the opposite — they wait for the crisis and then pay whatever it costs.

So AKVO doesn't try to be everyone's solution. It takes its bets, focuses, and evolves as demand shows up.

Green and Cheaper, or Don't Bother

Asked what advice he'd give anyone eyeing climate tech as a category, Bagga started by rejecting the category itself. He hates the segmentation — the idea that "climate tech" is a separate kind of business with separate rules, chief among them the assumption that being green earns you the right to cost more.

His example is a notepad. On Amazon, a fresh paper notepad costs about Rs 40; a recycled one costs Rs 110. His guess — and he's clear it's a guess — is that the fresh pad outsells the recycled one many times over. The premium exists because a small slice of buyers will pay it. That slice is not a market.

He's equally clear this isn't an Indian failing. He's worked the UAE market for years and found exactly the same mindset. There's the occasional organisation with a sustainability mandate and no price sensitivity, but building a company around encountering those is a remote bet.

His phrase for what actually works in India — and it's a good one — is sustainability with sasta. Sustainable and cheap. Anything else is a hobby.

Which brings the whole conversation back to where it started. A founder who admits he entered water for the money has built a company whose central discipline is cost per litre — and that discipline, not the mission statement, is what might make the machines matter. Founders like Climatenza's Akshay Makar, decarbonising industrial heat with solar thermal, have run into the same wall from the other side: the technology is rarely the hard part. Getting it below the price of the dirty incumbent is.

Key Takeaways

• Pick the ignored sector, not the exciting one: Bagga chose water in 2016 precisely because it was unorganised and neglected. Nine years later, the neglect is the moat.
• Don't inflate your technology: AKVO's core process is school-level condensation. The real work is efficiency, footprint and yield — and saying so builds more trust than mystifying it.
• Sell the waste you avoid, not the resource you use: ROs reject water, bottled water carries a transport footprint, tankers deplete a source elsewhere. Point-of-use generation avoids all three.
• Kill products that don't work, on a date: The domestic line ran five years and was discontinued on 31 December 2025. No pivot theatre, no soft sunset.
• Switch capex to opex to unlock enterprise buyers: WOW removed the capital approval entirely and turned the pitch into a per-litre comparison against what the customer already pays.
• Never build a business case on a subsidy: A policy that can be written can be reversed overnight. If incentives are what make the numbers work, the numbers don't work.
• Disqualify yourself from the wrong market: Refusing the data centre opportunity, on honest energy arithmetic, makes every other claim more credible.
• Sell to the buyer with a continuity plan: Enterprises buy protection before the crisis; consumers buy during it, at the worst possible price.
• Greener is not a pricing strategy: Adoption at scale requires greener and cheaper. Sustainability with sasta, or nothing.

About the Guest

Navkaran Singh Bagga is the founder and CEO of AKVO Atmospheric Water Systems, based in Kolkata. A third-generation entrepreneur, he was schooled in Kolkata, studied in the UK, and returned to India in 2007 to join the family international trade and exports business. Across 19 years he has operated in hospitality and steel manufacturing — including acquiring and turning around a steel company — before moving into clean technology in 2016. He is an outspoken advocate for market-led rather than subsidy-led adoption of sustainable technology.

AKVO Atmospheric Water Systems Pvt. Ltd. designs and manufactures atmospheric water generators in India, extracting drinking water from ambient humidity through condensation, multi-stage purification and mineralisation. Its product range includes the Akvo Water Block, Water Block Mini, Akvo Helios and Akvo Pod, alongside WOW (Water On Want), a capex-free pay-per-litre subscription model for corporate customers. Company materials cite more than 2,000 installations and over 100 million litres of water generated to date, with systems now running across 16 countries and around 90% of sales coming from outside India. The company's stated long-term goal is to become an on-site, decentralised drinking water utility.