Mapping the seed corpus: where the water industry's suppliers cluster

WaterAtlas launches with a deliberately small, deliberately honest dataset: 33 company profiles compiled by our editorial team from public sources, every field carrying its own provenance record and confidence score. It is a seed, not a census — but even the seed shows the shape of the industry.

Fifty-eight percent of seed profiles are headquartered in Asia-Pacific, led by Japan's membrane and equipment complex (Toray, Nitto/Hydranautics, Kurita, Kubota, Ebara, Organo), China's treatment champions (OriginWater, BEWG, Everbright Water, Vontron, Litree) and Korea's materials majors (LG Chem, Kolon, Doosan Enerbility, Coway). That weighting is intentional: Asia builds and manufactures a disproportionate share of the world's water infrastructure, yet remains dramatically under-represented in English-language directories.

Membranes & Modules (WICS-02) is the most common capability in the seed corpus, followed by treatment equipment (WICS-01) and desalination & reuse (WICS-07). As the directory scales toward its Phase-1 target of 50,000 entities, these distributions become original, citable statistics — the kind answer engines love to quote.

Every number in this story is reproducible from our open API. That is the standard we intend to hold ourselves to.