PakVitae, now EveryWater

In 2014, while studying engineering, I volunteered as a teacher in an Afghan refugee settlement outside Islamabad. Children regularly missed class because they were ill, and families depended on visibly unsafe water from a shared hand pump.

During an exchange semester at Florida State University in 2016, I began working on low-pressure hollow-fiber filtration. I brought the prototype back to Lahore and started PakVitae with Shayan Sohail and Arslan Ahmed.

The design constraints came from the setting: no pump, no electricity, and no consumable that a family would need to keep buying. Gravity had to provide the pressure, and users had to be able to clean the filter themselves.

A hollow fiber is a polymer tube about the width of a hair. Feed water sits outside the fiber, passes through the membrane wall, and exits through the center. Material retained on the outside can be removed by backwashing.

We began with a 100-nanometre ultrafiltration grade for household use and expanded the research into a tighter 16-nanometre grade and a series of nanofiltration and reverse-osmosis grades. The membrane had to be matched to the source water and the delivery setting. A gravity-fed household unit and a pumped system for dissolved contaminants are different products, even when their fibers come from the same development platform.

My work covered polymer and bore formulations, fiber spinning, potting, module design, microscopy, molecular-weight-cutoff and flux testing, product integration, and early field use. We built these capabilities first in Lahore, across the 100 nm and 16 nm ultrafiltration grades and into nanofiltration and reverse-osmosis development, and in 2019 I led the expansion of membrane research and development into a Singapore laboratory, setting up the experimental program and the equipment it needed.

The laboratory could tell us about flux, pore structure and rejection. Field use showed whether the product could be installed, cleaned and kept in service.

During the Lahore demonstrations, people did not simply receive a finished object. They handled it, questioned the steps, and showed us where the routine was unclear. That experience helped shape the gravity setup and the syringe backwash.

It also changed how I thought about evidence. A unit shipped, a unit installed and a unit still being used correctly are three different results. Price, maintenance, compatible spare parts, training and local support often determine whether membrane performance becomes reliable water access.

Building a water company required decisions about more than the membrane. Across this period, EveryWater raised more than $8 million in equity, bank, and grant financing. I supported these raises by preparing proposals and translating membrane research, tooling, manufacturing, quality testing, field delivery, and measurement requirements into budgets and technical milestones.

Fundraising was the beginning of the work, not the end. We had to decide which technical or delivery constraint the next unit of capital should remove, monitor whether the spending produced the expected milestone, and revise priorities when production or field evidence changed.

Early support came as international seed grants from Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, the United States and the United Arab Emirates, and that is what moved the technology from prototype into manufacturing and field delivery.

I worked across technical, finance, manufacturing and implementation teams so that funding decisions stayed connected to operating needs.

A filter is not the whole intervention. What a household actually receives is a device plus a set of instructions about how to install it, how to keep it working and when to stop using it. I converted installation, safe-use, and maintenance requirements into versioned English and Urdu guidance covering first-use flushing, safe collection, scheduled backwashing, troubleshooting, stop-use conditions, and service records. The manual made correct use and maintenance part of the delivery model rather than an afterthought.

Writing that guidance forced a discipline the laboratory does not. Every known failure mode had to become a step someone could follow without supervision, in a second language, with no technician nearby. The limits had to be stated as plainly as the capabilities: an ultrafiltration membrane at this pore size is a barrier to bacteria and protozoa, and it is not a treatment for dissolved chemicals such as arsenic, fluoride, nitrate or salinity.

Our membrane-development record was always stronger than our record of continued use at the point of consumption. We knew what the fiber could reject. We knew much less about whether a household was still drinking filtered water eighteen months later. That gap shaped how I think about evidence now: product, service and measurement are one intervention, not three, and the plan has to say in advance what result would lead to a scale, a redesign or a stop.

This experience taught me to treat technical efficacy, delivery, continued use and health outcomes as separate questions. It also taught me to ask what evidence would change a product, operating or funding decision.

A low bill of materials is not enough on its own. Manufacturing yield, defects, freight, distributor margin, maintenance and local support all affect what reaches a household and stays in use. That is the part of innovation work I now carry into research and program assessment.