Investor Information
“Day Zero” represents the first day when you can’t drink water from the tap. The need to treat your own water may arise from a natural disaster like an earthquake, or from water quality problems with your local water systems. Or, you may be one of the millions of people who have to boil their water every day over a fire to make it safe to drink. In recognition of this challenge, our Mission is to make versatile water purification products for emergencies and daily use. Our products are designed to improve human health and reduce carbon emissions.
It is clear that our solution needs to be inexpensive and designed for where safe water is critically important – in the home. Hence, our Vision: We intend to make clean drinking water available to families throughout the world to improve their health and protect the environment. Once scaled, DayZero’s UV water treatment will ultimately reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and improve public health worldwide.
What makes our product unique is its safety and convenience. In addition to automatically adjusting treatment time when the water quality is poor, using it is truly as simple as filling the pitcher with water and pressing a button. It operates off a battery just like a cell phone if there is no external power available, and it stores treatment data for automatic carbon credit reporting. It treats enough water for multiple families, with no filters to change or hoses to attach.
DayZero Water Awarded $300,000 NSF Grant—Now Seeking Angel Investors
February 7, 2025 DayZero Water, Inc. has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), recognizing the commercial potential and global impact of our breakthrough water purification technology. NSF awards these highly competitive grants only to projects with strong scientific innovation and the potential for large-scale commercialization that improves lives worldwide. This funding from the NSF’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program accelerates our path to market, bringing sustainable water solutions to regions that need them most.
With NSF validation in place, we are actively seeking angel investors who align with our mission to deliver clean water while driving sustainability. This is a unique opportunity to invest in a high-impact company at the forefront of water purification and global decarbonization.
INTRO
Founding Team
David Conklin, PhD - CEO & President
Dr. Conklin brings long career in computer science, managing technology companies, and in the latter part of his career, conducting research and projects to understand and address climate change. He received his Ph.D. in Biological and Ecological Engineering from Oregon State University. He combined his computer-science and climate-change skills in serving as the principal of Oregon Freshwater Simulations, a company focused on evaluating impacts to a major river system under various climate scenarios.
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Paul Berg, P.E. - Inventor
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William J. Briskey, MBA, P.E. Business Development
Mr. Briskey brings a variety of skills to DayZero Water from his technical and business experience. He has a strong background in industrial control systems within multiple industries and started his career in aerospace. He transitioned from system software and hardware design to technical sales and then worked as the Director of Marketing and Sales for a premier high-speed wood-fiber scanning company. Just prior to joining the DZW family, he developed a new market for a start-up company to capture and utilize aerial-imagery products for the agriculture industry, and worked with a liquefied natural gas startup. Mr. Briskey earned his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and a Masters of Business Administration, and is currently the head coach of the Corvallis High School Robotics team.
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David Holman - Engineering
Mr. Holman has a BA in Architecture and many years of experience building mechanical, electrical, plumbing, HVAC, and other custom systems. He worked for Dr. Conklin at Oregon Freshwater Simulations writing support software, doing data preparation, and model parameter estimation. He has participated in several of the NASA Leonid Multi-Instrument Airborne Campaign missions for airborne meteor astronomy. He continues to develop and run analytical software for data from ground-based automated meteor observation systems and publishing the results.
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Christopher M. Smith, PE - INVENTOR/Fabricator
Mr. Smith has always been an outside-of-the-box engineer/designer and fabricator and worked for a variety of companies as an employee or a contractor with a full machine shop. The last 20 years he operated his own business designing and building a wide variety of specialty tools for the nuclear industry. His engineering-service-contracting also allowed him to work directly with medical and food industries creating complex machines, such as a radio gel chiller for radioactive injections, curly-fry cutter and waffle-fry cutter. Mr. Smith designed and built the original water box that utilized a mercury vapor tube (UV-C bulb) to purify water and powered by a hand-crank generator, contributing to Paul Berg’s patent. He is currently transitioning DayZero’s product into a production version incorporating UV LEDs.
David Roth, PHD - Advisor
Dr. Roth spent most of his career working for the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industry in the computer department, developing user-friendly data systems and providing assistance for users. He was also active as an officer of SEIU (Service Employees International Union). In retirement, he’s spent a lot of time organizing neighbors in preparation for a Cascadia Subduction Zone Earthquake. Producing sufficient amounts of potable water for a neighborhood will be critical, hence his interest in developing the DayZero product as soon as possible.
Amy Berg, PHD - Advisor
Dr. Berg is an assistant professor of philosophy at Rice University, where she researches and teaches ethics. Her work on charitable giving and the effective altruism movement has been discussed by NPR,1843 magazine, and Inc. magazine.
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Randall McGregor, MD - Advisor
Dr. McGregor’s career covered a variety of public health interests, with a focus on Surgical Anesthesia. An avid outdoorsman, he brings a knowledge of recreational remote water treatment and application guidance for emergency preparedness situations.
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Carol Sweeney - Advisor
Market Analysis
Assuming some pre-production sales during the first year and then a full-on market press to get the unit out to the market, this graph provides a revenue estimate generated from targeting the U.S. emergency preparedness market.
Many countries outside the U.S. cannot reliably provide safe water to their people. More than 2 billion people have water plumbed into their home that they cannot drink without first treating. 600 million of these people boil their water every day, most of them over a fire because they cannot afford in-home treatment systems. These families are especially valuable as DZW customers because their daily use generates a perpetual carbon-credit revenue that eventually becomes far larger than sales revenue. The only other viable competitive solution for families is filtering, but the method is slow and requires continually buying and replacing filters.
Ignoring any sales revenue, the following chart shows the potential revenue resulting from families using the product on a daily basis and automatically generating carbon credits because their DZW unit was used to treat water in lieu of boiling. The estimate assumes that sales begin in year two and that the product qualifies for a market value of $15 per carbon credit, where each carbon credit represents one metric ton (tonne) of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) not produced.
Year |
Units In Use |
CO2e Tonnes |
CC Value |
Accum CC |
| 2 | 350 | 421 | $6,322 | $6,322 |
| 3 | 1,290 | 1,553 | $23,300 | $29,622 |
| 4 | 3,850 | 4,636 | $69,539 | $99,161 |
| 5 | 11,900 | 14,329 | $214,938 | $314,099 |
| 6 | 57,000 | 68,636 | $1,029,535 | $1,343,634 |
| 7 | 170,000 | 204,703 | $3,070,544 | $4,414,178 |
| Totals | 244,390 | 294,279 | $4,414,178 |
Developing countries will be reached by establishing assembly and distribution channels with existing groups already offering products and services in targeted areas. There are also emergency response organizations outside the U.S. who would pay more up front to compensate for the lack of carbon credits generated since the units would primarily be used during an emergency and not year round.
Activities
If you are interested in making a difference in climate and world health, contact us through the form below or call (541) 286-5465 to start a conversation. We believe it will take $1.5 million to get us into production and profitable. We have been through the Cascadia CleanTech Accelerator program and have recently completed our conversion from an LLC to a Corp C entity.
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