‘ChilCorp – Water’ Named as a Qualified Team in $119M XPRIZE Water Scarcity Global Competition

Plantation, Florida Sep 24, 2025 (Issuewire.com) - ChilCorp - Water, a climate-tech startup founded and led by engineer and inventor Kaustubh Chilwarwar that is pioneering solid-state, electricity-free desalination technology, has been officially named a Qualified Team in the XPRIZE Water Scarcity competition (Track BNovel Materials and Methods), a $119 million global initiative to unlock sustainable access to clean water through next-generation seawater desalination systems.

Following a rigorous international evaluation, ChilCorp - Water was selected as one of a cohort of 143 innovators advancing to the next phase: Qualified Teams Testing. What began in Kaustubhs living room, built on intuition, self-filed patents, and early experiments across improvised labs, is now among the top-ranked potential solutions reimagining the future of desalination.

The companys flagship technology, called Water Cubes, is designed to passively extract freshwater from seawater using microstructured hydrophilic surfaces and ambient infrared radiation, with no membranes, electricity, or moving parts.

We are honored to be named a Qualified Team in this incredible global competition, said Kaustubh Chilwarwar, Founder of ChilCorp - Water. Water Cubes represent a new frontier in decentralized desalination that is scalable, silent, and self-powered. Our goal is to enable abundant water anywhere, even off-grid or in energy-scarce regions.

Globally, over 2 billion people lack access to safe drinking water, according to the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme. Regions most affected include Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, where communities often rely on expensive or unreliable water sources. While the long-term vision is to serve these water-scarce regions, ChilCorp - Water plans initial field tests in America and Europe, both surrounded by oceans and facing growing climate-related water stress, before scaling to global deployment.

Water Cubes are stackable wafer-based modules that leverage the Exclusion Zone (EZ) phenomenon, forming solute-free layers of water at hydrophilic surfaces. This passive, ambient-energy-driven process offers a durable and maintenance-light alternative to high-pressure RO systems, especially in industrial and climate-sensitive use cases. ChilCorp has filed multiple patents and is actively developing field-ready prototypes.

ChilCorps early components were fabricated at the Washington Nanofabrication Facility (WNF) at the University of Washington and the Idaho Microfabrication Laboratory (IML) at Boise State University. The system remains pre-prototype but has already reached critical design milestones and has been independently valued at $44.6 million USD (pre-revenue, pre-prototype) by global startup valuation platform Equidam, based on the patent portfolio, market potential, and technical differentiation.

The project is supported by a multidisciplinary team, which includes Stefan Grigorov, founder of FounderCentre in Sofia, Bulgaria, who contributes to strategic development and investor support, along with Arvind Kumar, Trupti Puttewar, and Suman Sah who helped establish ChilCorp International Pvt. Ltd. in India to support future deployments.

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XPRIZE Water Scarcity is a five-year global competition sponsored by the Mohamed bin Zayed Water Initiative, aimed at catalyzing affordable, energy-efficient desalination solutions for global impact. Qualified Teams represent the most promising approaches to revolutionizing seawater access for the future.

For more information, visit: www.chilcorp-water.com
To learn more about the competition: xprize.org/water

About XPRIZE 

XPRIZE is the recognized global leader in designing and executing large-scale competitions to solve humanity's greatest challenges. For over 30 years, our unique model has democratized crowd-sourced innovation and scientifically scalable solutions that accelerate a more equitable and abundant future. Donate, learn more, and co-architect a world of abundance with us at xprize.org.

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