Keri Waters

Keri Waters is a hardware operator, engineer, and founder whose career has run through the semiconductor, connected-hardware, water, and energy sectors. She is the author of More Energy, Clean Planet: Cheap Power Will Solve the Climate Crisis Within a Century, which makes the engineering case for why cheap, abundant clean energy is the climate strategy that can actually work at scale.

Waters holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. Her career began in 1997 at Silicon Graphics, and over three decades she has built hardware companies, raised multiple rounds of venture capital and strategic capital, and invented or co-invented several patented technologies.

Waters founded Buoy Labs, an Internet-of-Things company that built smart sensors for residential water leak detection. The company was conceived as a conservation tool, but its real market turned out to be the insurance industry, a discovery that reshaped how Waters thinks about risk, infrastructure, and the incentive structures that determine what actually gets built. Buoy was acquired by Resideo in 2019, and Waters then led the $320 million water business unit there as Vice President and General Manager. Her companies have partnered with Fortune 500 firms including USAA and Delta Faucet and delivered on federally funded programs with the Office of Naval Research and the Department of Homeland Security.

She later served as founding Chief Innovation Officer at the University of Austin, helping shape a new institution with a national footprint during its early formation.

Across her operating career, Waters noticed a pattern. The technical problem in any given project was usually solvable; what remained unsolved was economics, specifically the cost of the energy required to run the machines. When she recognized that pattern repeating across industries, she saw that the broader climate crisis follows the same logic. The planet does not have a technology problem. It has an energy cost problem, and those costs have now changed.

Waters speaks and writes about the business of the energy transition, with a focus on the founder opportunities that open as electricity prices fall below critical thresholds. She is available for keynotes, board discussions, and private convenings with founders, investors, and executives navigating the climate economy. She lives in Austin, Texas.