How Xatoms is using AI to solve the global water crisis

Every September, Climate Week and Global Citizen Week in New York bring together policymakers, investors and innovators focused on the world’s most pressing problems.

It’s also when Cisco Systems Inc. and Global Citizen recognize the winner of the Global Citizen Prize: Cisco Youth Leadership Award. Cisco and Global Citizen created the award in 2018 to honor a young leader who uses technology to help end extreme poverty, and this year’s recipient may have the most compelling story yet.

Diana Virgovicova (pictured) is the founder and CEO of Xatoms (pronounced “X-Atoms”), a Toronto-based company that uses artificial intelligence and quantum chemistry to design sunlight-activated materials that break down pollutants in water. The award comes with a $250,000 grant, and Xatoms was chosen from more than 2,000 applications.

Most of the AI conversation at Climate Week focused on what AI takes from the planet: power, land and, increasingly, water. Xatoms offers a positive counterpoint, a case study in AI giving back.

A personal mission, not a market opportunity

Most founders find a market. Virgovicova found a problem the hard way. She grew up in a village of about 800 people in Slovakia, surrounded by farms that used heavy amounts of pesticides. “I got sick when I was 14 years old,” she told me. “I was diagnosed with ovarian cancer because of the water I drank.”

After her diagnosis, she persuaded her mother to go backpacking across Asia. On trains in India, she heard from women facing the same thing. “I learned that there is a girl in Slovakia who got sick. There is a girl in India who’s getting infections. There is a girl in Africa who has to spend long hours every single day searching for clean water,” she said. “So, we need to find a solution, and it is affecting mainly women across the globe.”

Globally, women and girls spend 250 million hours a day collecting water, more than three times the time men and boys spend. “While boys go to school, the girls are responsible for bringing a bucket of water home, and they start missing school very early on,” Virgovicova explained. “It’s an educational, economic and health problem.”

And it’s growing. “We have 2 billion people that don’t have access to clean drinking water, and this number is actually growing because of flooding, climate change,” she said.

Going after the contaminants everyone ignores

One of the more interesting aspects of Xatoms is where it chose to play. Many water treatment efforts target bacteria such as E. coli because the effects are immediate. Xatoms goes after the harder problem: complex industrial pollutants such as pesticides, pharmaceuticals, forever chemicals and heavy metals.

“I think we are forgetting about these complex contaminants because they don’t make us sick tomorrow. They make us sick in 10 years,” she said. “They give us chronic diseases. They cause infertility.” She made a point I hadn’t considered: Scientific progress is making it worse.

“We are able to create better antibiotics, but these better antibiotics are more complex, thus more difficult to destroy in water,” she said. That’s a second-order problem traditional treatment wasn’t built for, and exactly where advanced computational design has an edge.

Quantum chemistry plus AI equals speed

At 17, while working with a university professor in Slovakia, Virgovicova used quantum chemistry software to design a new molecule that harnesses sunlight to break down water pollutants. That work earned her a Diploma of Excellence from the Swedish Royal Family and a full scholarship to the University of Toronto.

“What is so exciting about this science is that we can use computers to design new materials, and we don’t have to create them in the lab,” she said. “We can see these materials, how they react, and what their properties are before we even synthesize them.”

Quantum chemistry gets far fewer headlines than quantum computing, so I asked her to explain it. “Quantum helps us understand these molecules at a fundamental level, including how the atoms within the molecule interact,” she said. “When we know these fundamental properties, we can understand what makes each molecule good at something, and that helps us design an even better molecule, a better material.”

The output is a photocatalyst powder. “Initially, it was a molecule in a computer, but we were able to synthesize it in a lab,” Virgovicova said. “We put this photocatalytic powder into water. It splits water into OH radicals, and the OH radicals then destroy contaminants.”

Because it’s a catalyst, it isn’t consumed, so a small amount can treat “hundreds of gallons,” she said. Earlier photocatalysts required ultraviolet light; her design works with visible light, such as sunlight or LEDs, eliminating the need for expensive UV reactors.

AI is the accelerant. “It would take a decade if we did it without AI,” she said. “We can do it in 30 days.” That’s the real story for business leaders. Materials discovery has historically been slow, expensive and lab-bound, and Xatoms has transformed it into a computational pipeline.

AI that helps solve AI’s water problem

Here’s where it matters for technology buyers. Data centers consume enormous volumes of water for cooling, and the AI buildout is making that worse. I asked Virgovicova whether Xatoms can flip the script. “There are a lot of problems with contaminants within the data center,” she said. “The data center water needs to be completely clean for cooling,” she said. “We are able to use this catalyst to help reuse the water in data centers.”

This is an underappreciated opportunity. Hyperscalers and neoclouds face mounting pressure over water use, and the industry’s response has largely focused on cooling design. Reuse through improved treatment is a different and more planet-friendly solution.

Not one-size-fits-all

Xatoms works with Indigenous communities in Canada under longstanding boil-water advisories, as well as in Kenya and South Africa. Virgovicova told me the footprint now includes Japan and Azerbaijan. Every engagement is customized.

“We collect a water sample. Recently, we shipped the sample from Azerbaijan all the way to Canada,” she said. “We identify the contaminant and then determine which of these 88 options would be the best.”

Customers define the outcome. “Some of them want to take yellow water and decolorize it. Some of them have a specific contaminant in mind that they want to remove or reduce,” she said.

Next up are Turkey, where co-founder Kerem Topal Ismail Oglou grew up, and the broader Middle East, driven by textile manufacturing and oil and gas. She also met South Africa’s water minister during Climate Week ahead of a trip to Cape Town.

Being named a global winner of the World Economic Forum’s Water Resilience Challenge opened doors with large enterprises. “We had the chance to interact with some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies, which helped us create pilots and partnerships,” she said.

Water is chronically underfunded

The Cisco grant is moving directly into execution. “We have more than six major projects coming up, so we need help with lab work,” she said. “We need to figure out the best way to manufacture more materials.” The goal is to “commercialize this technology as fast as we can.”

When I joked that billionaires are hunting for water on Mars while we haven’t solved it here, she pointed out a funding gap. “About 3% of climate VC funding goes to water only,” she said. Water underpins industry, agriculture and now AI infrastructure, yet it remains capital-starved.

Advice for the next generation

Virgovicova mentors young founders, especially women in science and climate, and her advice is very direct. “There’s always going to be skepticism in every single room you go into at first,” she said. “It’s very important that you know how to present yourself and that you’re confident. You can really prove everyone wrong as long as you know your stuff.” With women still scarce among Fortune 500 CEOs, she added, “If I can do it, you can do it as well.”

Her favorite piece of advice: “If you focus on watering your grass, you don’t care about someone’s grass being greener.” And the AI myth she wants gone? “That it’s going to destroy the world. I think it’s a tool for improving the world.”

Final thoughts

Cisco uses this award to make a point it rarely gets credit for: technology’s value is measured by what it does for people. Xatoms applies two of the decade’s most hyped technologies, AI and quantum, to a tangible, urgent problem.

For technology leaders, there are three key takeaways. First, AI’s biggest payoff may come from scientific discovery, where compressing a decade of work into 30 days can reshape an entire industry’s economics. Second, AI’s water problem has solutions beyond cooling design, and data center builders should be evaluating treatment and reuse partners now. Third, water deserves far more capital than it receives.

In 10 years, Virgovicova wants Xatoms to be “a global leader in discovery of these materials,” with solutions for many toxic contaminants worldwide. Given how far she has come from a village of 800 people, I wouldn’t bet against her.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

Photo: Zeus Kerravala