Reconciled application draft for Evan Thomas. Built from Avery's draft responses, checked against Virridy records, and mapped to the fields on Mulago's live Airtable form.
Framing, per Avery: the financing model leads. Virridy is a results-based subsidy for water operations, starting with carbon; the sensors and water quality technology appear only as the verification layer that makes those results payable.
Each answer below carries its source and a live count against the form's stated limit, so nothing goes in over length or unverified. Edits from Avery's version are explained in place.
In the order the Airtable form asks them.
Both boxes checked: Evan is the most senior decision maker committing 30+ hours per week ("Yes. I'm the founder and CEO."), and the organization's budget well exceeds $50k.
Use carbon markets to keep safe water flowing.
Building water points was never the hard part. For close to twenty years, the sector has tried to professionalize water operators in Africa and get tariffs to cover the cost of running systems. It hasn't worked: almost no utility on the continent charges tariffs that cover real operating costs, so systems fail once donor funding runs out.
We use the carbon market as the subsidy that keeps water flowing. Carbon credit revenue pays operators for every liter of water provided, not just for building the system. Because carbon markets demand rigorous verification, our projects also have to prove people aren't drinking contaminated water, something the sector has otherwise never solved.
We've provided safe drinking water to more than seven million people across Rwanda, Kenya, and the DRC. Current programs will reach four million more by 2030 and avoid over a million tons of CO2. We've raised $8.5M in equity and $5M in NSF contracts, hold $30M in offtake agreements through 2033, and have a term sheet for an $11M project-finance debt fund.
Rwanda, Kenya, DRC, Tanzania, Burundi, Madagascar, Ethiopia, and the United States.
Cost per averted DALY: sustained, E. coli-free water supply converted to DALYs averted through RCT-backed modeling.
In a cluster-randomized controlled trial in Rwanda, our safe water program cut under-five diarrhea by 29% (Kirby et al., PLoS Med 2019). We model that effect through to DALYs averted, and GiveWell ran its own cost-effectiveness analysis and funded the program's expansion. Because carbon revenue covers the program's full operating cost, those averted DALYs come at close to zero net donor cost.
Cultivo is the closest parallel: they proved individual grassland restoration projects worked, then used that track record to get their methodology insured by Munich Re, turning a one-off model into a bankable asset class other capital could enter. We're following the same path with water: proving individual carbon-financed operator projects work, with the aim of aggregating them into a diversified portfolio that de-risks the category for investors and connects it to buyers, the way Cultivo did for land.
Two minutes or less, Evan speaking directly to camera, shared link pasted into the form. Suggested beats:
| Name | Evan Thomas |
| Work email | evan.thomas@virridy.com |
| Organization | Virridy |
| Website | https://virridy.com |
| Personal LinkedIn | Added by Evan on the form |
| Founder | Yes |
| Sectors | WASH + Health |
| Legal structure | For-profit; confirm whether to also check Nonprofit for an affiliated entityNeeds Evan |
| Co-founders | Left blank (none listed) |
| Full-time employees | 56 |
| Year registered | 2012 |
| Budget in 2026 (USD) | $6,500,000 |
Mulago dropped "Why exponential?" from this year's form, but as Avery notes it will come up almost immediately on early calls. Internalize rather than paste.
Our dream is to prove that you can pay for water operations with a results-based subsidy, starting with carbon. To do this, we need to prove individual projects are profitable, and that a portfolio of them can be too. For that dream to come true, carbon programs need to graduate from nice-to-have offsets to global compliance mechanisms. One of our programs in Rwanda just got approved to sell credits into the compliance market, meaning airlines can buy them, not just companies buying voluntarily. That market alone needs tens of millions more credits in the next couple years, and it's forecasted to outnumber voluntary credits within a few years. We're building for that future, where a results-based subsidy for water isn't a nice idea a few donors fund, but a real market with real, structural demand behind it.