Earlier this year, Valor Water Analytics (Valor) was acquired by Xylem Inc., a $13B water technology company that services utility and commercial clients across 150 countries. While this is big news in its own right within the water industry, it’s especially exciting for the Environmental Finance Center: Valor Founder and CEO Dr. Christine Boyle previously worked as a research assistant at the EFC while pursuing her doctorate in water resource planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

While at the EFC, Dr. Boyle led a team on a multiyear study of water utility data analytics for the state’s Urban Water Consortium. Following her time at the EFC and postdoctoral work, Dr. Boyle moved to California where we she would found Valor and work with utilities worldwide to introduce technologies that drive efficiency and set a new bar for how utilities understand and utilize data.

We sat down with Dr. Boyle to talk about Valor, entrepreneurship, and—most importantly—the future of the industry. Read on for her answers and insight: Continue reading