BertzmanSV/Burnt Island Ventures Partner to Fund Water Enterprises

Bertzman Social Ventures and Burnt Island Ventures are partnering to fund water enterprises. Both organizations share the ambition to improve water quality and access around the world.

Water entrepreneurs are emerging with the skill and insight to meet increasing demand while developing solutions to water problems that can scale.

But they have a problem.

As with many early-stage businesses, growth capital and financing is really difficult to obtain. Simply put, if you spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to finance a business, the time available to operate it and create the solutions so deeply needed in the world is diminished.

Burnt Island was formed by Tom Ferguson to find, fund and support the best water founders with equity investment at the earliest stages. Tom honed his investment thesis and approach to water entrepreneurship over five years running the Accelerator at Imagine H2O. “It’s been wonderful to make the transition into the investing side of water, bringing the leverage of investor capital to back some really very talented entrepreneurs indeed. Good things are happening in water entrepreneurship.”

Bertzman operates with the same urgency toward helping water founders, offering affordable working capital loans to finance such things as inventory and customer receivables to meet short term cash flow needs without giving up equity. A key intervention for accelerating the development and scaling of water solutions. Bertzman’s scalable, simple approach has the potential to transform the capital efficiency of these companies – with wide implications for water and climate tech in general.

Neil Berman from Bertzman hopes that “my years working as an accountant and controller makes me keenly aware of the challenges facing business owners. I hope to use that experience to make their days’ a little bit easier. We think it’s something simple that can have outsize impact in solving water problems.”

The combination of the Bertzman/Burnt Island partnership aims to offer a real solution to everyday issues faced by emerging water enterprises, allowing them to direct scarce capital to more productive uses, improving the speed and quality outcomes for water founders, customers, investors and the environment.