Pure water and inexpensive dry air,
made anywhere.
We turn humidity into pure water while cutting energy costs for climate control.
Company Overview
Water Harvesting Inc., d/b/a WaHa Inc., builds the WaHa Vaporator®: a machine that generates distilled-grade pure water and inexpensive dry air from one energy input, anywhere on Earth. At its center is a thermodynamic engine, a sealed, closed-loop heat pump architecture protected by WaHa’s foundational patents, driving a desiccant wheel that captures moisture in its pores even from very dry air. The engine recovers the heat that every competing architecture throws away, and that single fact changes the economics of both water generation and dehumidification.
WaHa is headquartered in Fremont, California, with offices in the UAE.
Built on Nobel Prize-Winning Chemistry
WaHa was co-founded in 2018 by Professor Omar Yaghi of UC Berkeley, the inventor of reticular chemistry and of metal-organic frameworks (MOFs): crystalline materials whose pores can be designed to capture specific molecules, including water, from the air. In October 2025, that work was honored with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
WaHa holds the exclusive license to three water-harvesting MOF patent families from Professor Yaghi’s UC Berkeley laboratory, and has spent the years since founding building the machine worthy of the material: the thermodynamic engine that regenerates the desiccant at a fraction of the energy any prior approach required. The material that won the Nobel Prize is the material inside every WaHa Vaporator®.
Company History
Recognized Early and Often
- Semifinalist, Mohamed bin Zayed Water Initiative (the Al Miyah Challenge)
- Selected by TAQA for Project DROP in the UAE
- Featured in the Smithsonian’s Futures exhibit
- Winner, Most Promising Technology, WEFTEC (2019)
Leadership Team
Frank Ramirez
Chris Kay
Eugene Kapustin
David Kuo
Dan Chandler
Jeff Peterson
Partners
