Watergate Unfiltered, 2025

When “later” arrived

“Wait, water is actually a problem?”

If 2024 was the year we proved the technology works, 2025 was the year the world finally realised why it needs it. For years, water risk lived in the background. It was filed under “deal with later”.

In 2025, “later” arrived.

The UK experienced its hottest and driest year on record. Water bills rose sharply. Hosepipe bans became routine. Insurers tightened their stance on escape of water. Codes of practice quietly shifted from guidance to expectation. Regulation started moving faster than many people were comfortable with.

We would love to say we sailed through the chaos perfectly. We didn’t.

We took some hits, learned some expensive lessons, and came out the other side with a stronger business and a deeper moat.

Here is the unfiltered truth of how we navigated 2025.

What we thought 2025 would be…

…and what it turned into instead.

We entered 2025 expecting a fairly conventional scale-up year.

Large enterprise projects converting from pilots into rollouts. An institutional funding round closing. Continued validation, but in a predictable, linear way.

That is not how the year played out.

Decision-making slowed. Sales cycles stretched. Some larger deals slipped into 2026. And after many months of work, an institutional funding process with a corporate venture partner collapsed late in the journey.

It was frustrating, distracting, and frankly, it stung. The reasons given were internal. Our interpretation is simpler: corporate venture capital is slow, unpredictable and often misaligned.

Rather than doubling down on a broken process, we adjusted course.

Over the course of the year, hundreds of individuals backed Watergate through crowdfunding, contributing over £735,000. That support mattered – not just financially, but as confirmation that the problem we’re solving resonates far beyond boardrooms and investment committees.

At the same time, something else accelerated.

Customers who did deploy moved from curiosity to reliance. Our technology was tested in live buildings, under real operational pressure. The feedback was consistent: prevention works, and it pays back faster than most people expect.

2025 turned out to be less about smooth execution, and more about learning where the real foundations of the business actually are.

Growing up: beyond the shut-off valve

For a long time, we were seen as a smart shut-off valve.

In 2025, we became an infrastructure company.

We launched Watergate Server, our enterprise-grade, large-pipe device designed for pipes 28 mm and above. That single step opened up an entirely different category of buildings and use cases: commercial offices, large estates, construction sites, infrastructure and utility-scale environments.

Server delivers real-time diagnostics across flow, pressure, temperature, hardness and Legionella risk. It integrates with BMS platforms and APIs, supports multiple communication protocols, and works in both modern developments and legacy estates.

Crucially, it aligns fully with the Joint Code of Practice for Escape of Water on Construction Sites, which an increasing number of insurers now treat as a requirement rather than a suggestion.

This marked a shift in how Watergate is perceived.

We stopped being seen as a smart add-on.

We became part of the plumbing.

Proof beats promises

Technology only matters if it delivers outcomes.

In 2025, several customers moved decisively from proof-of-value projects to scale. One of the largest residential real estate operators in the world rolled Watergate out across multiple large developments, delivering water savings of up to 72%. This was not a controlled trial. It was live, operational use, with real financial consequences.

In HMOs and smaller multi-property portfolios, customers demonstrated payback periods of around two months based purely on water savings. That does not include avoided damage, reduced callouts, insurance implications or ESG benefits. Just water.

We also completed our first commercial office deployment outside the UK, and shipped devices into multiple European markets as early international traction began to build.

Not everything converted. Not every opportunity moved quickly.

But the ones that did proved something important: smart water management is not a nice-to-have.

It delivers ROI, and it scales.

The unglamorous work that actually matters

Much of 2025 was spent on work that will never win headlines, but without which nothing else functions.

We rebuilt and streamlined our dashboard for multi-property managers, making it easier to identify problem units and track water and carbon costs across estates in real time. We introduced features such as Locate My Device, tenant-reported incidents and resident QR codes, improving resilience and operational control across portfolios.

We expanded integrations across smart buildings, including SmartSpaces, Crestron, Home Assistant, Control4, Fibaro and more. This meant Watergate could plug into ecosystems people already rely on, rather than forcing them to adopt yet another silo.

We also began integrating with third-party data loggers to ingest readings directly from utility or operator-owned meters.

That work is slow, complex and largely invisible. It is also essential if water is to be managed properly at portfolio or utility level.

None of this is glamorous. All of it is necessary.

The homeowner revolution

While much of our focus in 2025 was on larger buildings and portfolios, something else happened quietly in the background.

Insurers increasingly began recommending Watergate directly to homeowners as part of escape-of-water risk mitigation.

At the same time, organic demand grew from smart home communities. Thanks to deep integrations with platforms like Home Assistant and others, many customers began discovering and buying Watergate without us actively advertising to them.

That kind of bottom-up adoption is difficult to manufacture. It only happens when a product fits naturally into existing ecosystems and solves a real problem.

Recognition, certification and external validation

We do not build Watergate for awards. But in 2025, third-party validation came from multiple directions at once: water, property, regulations and smart buildings.

A few highlights that genuinely mattered:

• Water Industry Awards – Leakage Initiative of the Year

  Widely regarded as the Oscars of the water industry. This is the room the utilities, regulators and serious infrastructure players pay attention to.

• Property Week – major wins in smart building technology and retrofit

  A strong signal that water efficiency is no longer a “nice sustainability add-on”. It is becoming part of how buildings are operated, protected and valued.

• Cityscape Global Innovation Challenge – Winner

  A global competition in Riyadh with 270 companies from around the world selected to compete. We won, and secured a funded proof-of-value project and meaningful visibility across the Middle East.

Beyond those, we picked up around a dozen other awards, prizes and recognitions across the year. Awards do not build products, but they do change who listens, who returns your calls, and how fast procurement moves.

Going global (properly)

The UK is our home, but water stress is a global problem. In 2025, we stopped looking at maps and started getting on planes, supported by accelerator programmes and missions that open doors you cannot open cold.

• United States and California

  Off the back of the Mayor of London mission to Los Angeles, and our participation in Grow London Global, we made serious inroads into the US market. We also targeted Milwaukee through BREW 2.0, a water-sector programme that sits in the centre of serious utility and infrastructure conversations.

• Hong Kong

  Through a trade mission led by HSBC, we engaged partners exploring how behavioural water management can work in dense, high-rise environments.

• UAE and Saudi Arabia

  Through introductions via REACH, we found strong demand in markets where water cost, desalination and regulation make prevention economically obvious.

Across all of these markets, the pattern was the same: in water-stressed regions, our value proposition is immediately understood. We’re not trying to persuade people water matters. They already know.

The hardware moat

In 2025, every pitch deck had “AI” in it. Ours did too. Beyond our original AI-driven recognition of appliance usage patterns and automated outbound alerts, we introduced Bob, our AI support assistant, which now resolves around 95% of customer queries within seconds.

We also began prototyping AI models capable of identifying specific leak types, such as leaking toilets, laying the groundwork for more targeted detection and prevention over time.

But the deeper insight this year was this – in an era where software can be copied overnight, certified hardware is the ultimate moat. 

You can copy code, but you can’t copy a physical device installed into the plumbing of a building.

That physical presence, combined with the telemetry and behavioural datasets we generate, is our superpower.

The parts we do not gloss over

Not everything went to plan. 

Some deals moved more slowly than expected, and one long-running funding process ended late. The lesson was clear: build around what you can control – product, delivery, evidence and partnerships – not decisions that sit elsewhere. 

That shift has made the business more resilient.

Looking ahead to 2026

We enter 2026 with more clarity than at any previous point.

Our product is stronger. Our strategy is more resilient. Our addressable market is larger. Regulatory tailwinds are accelerating. International demand is real.

We will continue to focus on prevention, scale and resilience. We will keep showing up where decisions are made. And we will keep building infrastructure for a world where water is no longer abundant, cheap or taken for granted.

To everyone who stuck with us through the delays, the pivots, and the growth – thank you.

There is a lot more to do.

And we are just getting started.

Krystian