America is entering a pivotal moment in its industrial history. After decades of offshoring and underinvestment, the United States is rebuilding the physical infrastructure that will define the next century of economic competitiveness: semiconductor fabs, advanced packaging facilities, biomanufacturing facilities, battery plants, critical minerals processing, aerospace and defense production lines, and more. These facilities are larger, more advanced, and more technologically demanding than anything built in prior eras. 

But beneath this historic wave of construction lies an overlooked, foundational dependency: water. Not just water as a commodity, but water as an engineered lifeblood of advanced facilities — ultrapure water for semiconductor manufacturing and pharmaceutical production; precision-controlled chemicals for battery materials; robust and adaptive treatment for complex industrial wastewater; advanced water recycling systems for water scarce sites; and thermal treatment processes for minerals processing and zero liquid discharge facilities. 

These systems are essential to America’s reindustrialization. And yet, they are also one of its greatest vulnerabilities. The supply chain for advanced water treatment systems is strained and outdated. Supply is not keeping up with demand and the vast majority of the supply for American advanced technology facilities comes from foreign factories. Compounding the supply-demand gap is a Water industry dominated by archaic incumbents, long consolidated, slow to innovate and adapt, and reliant on engineering and delivery practices that have seen little change in twenty years. 

The consequences are real: long lead times, geopolitical and logistics risks, uncertain tariff exposure, limited offsite manufacturing, and escalating costs for critical US industrial projects. As purity specifications tighten, capacities scale up, and wastewater streams become more complex, the water sector has not kept pace. 

We founded Fathom Water to solve these challenges. We have been quietly laying the foundation to bring new water technologies, new design methodologies, and new delivery models to the advanced manufacturing market. We combine incredible engineering and project management talent with a software-first approach powered by in-house agentic AI, digital twins, and an ontology-driven operating system we call FathomOS. This platform enhances our ability to develop, design and deliver, and optimize advanced water treatment solutions at the scale necessary to support America’s reindustrialization. 

We are always looking for exceptional talent within process engineering, data science, and software. If you are passionate about advanced water treatment and want to work within a software-first culture, Fathom is the place to build. 

Reshoring Strategic Supply Chains 

America is investing heavily to reshore advanced manufacturing and technology infrastructure. Manufacturers pouring $20B into a new semiconductor fab in Arizona or $8B into a biologics facility in North Carolina shouldn’t have to rely on foreign supply chains for mission-critical systems like water purification – the whole point of building these facilities on US soil is to reduce supply chain risks.  

The demand for advanced water solutions in the US is surging – well over $4 billion per year in new systems – yet existing suppliers can only meet a fraction of this need (around $1.5 billion). In fact, roughly 80% of advanced water treatment systems are currently manufactured in foreign factories. These strained and outdated global supply chains introduce delays and vulnerabilities at the exact moment we can least afford them. America’s industrial resurgence shouldn’t be bottlenecked by dependence on imported water treatment systems. 

The Water Challenge 

While the need for advanced water systems is rising, the state of the water industry has largely not kept up. Advanced manufacturing facilities today demand unprecedented water treatment complexity with zero tolerance for downtime. Ultrapure water quality now requires some constituents to be in the low parts-per-trillion (or high parts-per-quadrillion). Wastewater systems must treat more complex streams while also increasing reclaim rates that now frequently require zero liquid discharge. Yet the water sector has been slow to innovate and adapt. The last major improvements to ultrapure water flowsheets – technologies like electrodeionization (EDI) and gas transfer membranes (GTM) – were introduced roughly 20 years ago. Since then, the incumbent water companies (many of them 50 to 150 years old) have continued to operate with archaic, bureaucratic processes. In short, rising performance and capacity demands are colliding with stagnant technology and an ossified supplier base. This gap between what modern industry needs and what the water sector offers is widening every year. 

Compounding the technology gap is a critical skilled labor shortage in US construction. Building a cutting-edge water treatment system – the kind required for a leading-edge semiconductor fab – is an enormous undertaking, often involving 300–400+ skids and miles of piping and wiring. Each new fab can require 6,000–10,000 construction workers at peak, but our national workforce simply doesn’t have those numbers to spare. The US construction industry is currently short over 550,000 skilled tradespeople, leading to acute shortages in the very trades advanced facilities depend on most: high-purity welders, pipefitters, electricians, and more. Making matters worse, an estimated 40% of all skilled trades workers will retire within the next decade, turning the labor crunch into a structural constraint rather than a temporary hiccup. The result will be projects that face delays, cost overruns, and quality risks because there just aren’t enough qualified hands to do the work on-site. 

More work must be done offsite. Offsite manufacturing (OSM) is a well-known solution to site labor and schedule challenges, including large equipment modules built in controlled shops and then shipped them to site for final installation. However, most water treatment OEMs have been slow to truly embrace offsite manufacturing, especially for high-purity systems. Many still rely on stick-built construction or shoehorn their designs into standard shipping container sizes, limiting how much assembly can be done in advance. The industry has not adapted its offerings to meet the moment. This is the daunting backdrop against which we started Fathom. 

A new approach to advanced water solutions 

Fathom was built to solve these problems. Rather than following the playbook of legacy water companies, we adopt best practices from modern disruptors in other industries and rethink how advanced water solutions are designed and delivered. Our team combines deep domain expertise in advanced water treatment engineering and project execution with modern software and custom-built AI tools, enabling us to attack the pain points in both hardware and software domains simultaneously. Here’s how our approach is different: 

• Rethink from first principles: We rethink every aspect of water system design and delivery from the ground up. Nothing is assumed, and no legacy standard is immune from reinvention. This mindset mirrors how SpaceX approached aerospace - returning to first principles to redesign rockets based on physics, materials science, and manufacturing fundamentals rather than inheriting decades of entrenched conventions. In the same way, Fathom grounds its work in the underlying physics and chemistry of water treatment, reimagining how treatment is achieved and how systems are built, rather than incrementally iterating on legacy designs. 

• Software-first mentality: We aim to infuse software into every workflow and decision. Automation, simulation, and data aren’t additions - they are core to how we develop new technologies as well as design and deliver systems. This approach mirrors how Anduril transformed defense technology by treating complex hardware as software-defined infrastructure, built around continuous sensing, simulation, and autonomy. In the same way, Fathom uses a software-first philosophy to dramatically increase speed, agility, and quality across engineering and operations. (More on our software platform in a moment.) 

• Made in America: We design our solutions in-house and have the equipment fabricated by leading US manufacturing partners. This model gives Fathom control over the full stack of hardware and software, while leveraging our partners’ significant capital investments in factories and process technologies. In an industry that saw massive consolidation and offshoring (recall the USFilter era of the 1990s), Fathom’s model ensures critical water systems are once again engineered and fabricated onshore with modern capabilities. 

• Modular, modern manufacturing: We are committed to offsite fabrication and modular design for every project. Instead of constructing massive piping skids and tanks piece-by-piece on a client’s site, Fathom delivers pre-engineered modules that arrive nearly ready to plug in. Our team has decades of experience designing modular water treatment systems across North America, and we’ve learned how to maximize what can be built in a factory environment. Freed from the constraints of standard shipping containers, we design modules to the largest practical size the interstate highway system can accommodate – up to 14’ x 14’ x 80’. That provides about 5.7 times more volume for equipment (and labor hours packed in) per module than the typical 8.5’ x 40’ container-based skids many others use. Larger, smarter modules mean less work on site, shorter installation times, and faster time-to-operation for our customers. It’s a modern manufacturing approach to water systems, echoing how Tesla built giga-factories to streamline car production or how modern construction uses prefab assemblies to save time. We apply the same philosophy: build in controlled conditions for quality and speed, then deliver to the field for final hookup. 

Software-first in all things 

FathomOS is the software foundation we are building to unify design, simulation, data, controls, and operations into one cohesive environment. While still early in its development, the architecture of FathomOS is intentionally designed to evolve into a full-stack platform that enables a new level of speed, accuracy, and intelligence in how water systems are conceived and delivered. 

• Agentic AI: We have begun building and deploying the agentic AI tools to collaborate with the humans in the loop (our engineers), throughout our workflows. These AI assistants help our team explore designs faster, optimize processes, and even generate and evaluate engineering options that might be overlooked by traditional methods. The result is improved productivity, greater business velocity and agility, and higher-confidence designs. 

• Digital Twins: Fathom is designing a new class of reasoning-based digital twins tailored for the complex chemistries and dynamic conditions inherent to advanced manufacturing. These models will combine deterministic physics-based models with AI reasoning (machine learning) to predict performance, test scenarios, and support operations. 

• Unified Ontology and Data Model: A core element of FathomOS is a unified ontology that structures all project data - equipment, sensors, P&IDs, operating states, lifecycle changes - into a consistent, logical model. This ontology is a design artifact that will become the backbone for connecting every phase of a project into a single source of truth. 

• Seamless Data Integration: As FathomOS matures, it will serve as the integration layer that links project development, design and delivery, commissioning and startup, and operations. By replacing fragmented documents and spreadsheets with a structured, model-driven environment, FathomOS will dramatically improve continuity and consistency across the system lifecycle. 

AI-accelerated R&D: We are using AI and cutting-edge simulations to accelerate R&D for next-generation water technologies. Virtual labs and autonomous research agents iteratively test and refine new treatment concepts (for example, novel materials or chemical processes) at digital speed. We can rapidly identify promising ideas, simulate their performance under real-world conditions, and even guide physical prototyping and automated lab experiments. This tight loop between modeling and testing means breakthroughs that might have taken years can be validated in months – ready in time to meet the urgent needs of today’s reindustrialization push.