Lauren Greenlee, Ph.D.
Strategic advisor to early‑stage founders. Builder of an AI initiative rethinking water education.
I work at the intersection of deep technical expertise and early-stage company building, helping founding teams find focus, raise capital, and make sound technology decisions, while leading an AI initiative that makes decades of water science more accessible.
What I do
01
Strategic Advisory for Early-Stage Startups
I advise a small portfolio of early-stage startups across ag-tech, water, and deep tech. My role is part sounding board, part strategist: helping teams cut through noise to find focus, build a fundable story, and make smart calls on technology development.
02
AI & Water Education
I lead a proprietary AI initiative that applies retrieval-augmented generation to two decades of water science and engineering research, turning dense technical knowledge into tools people can actually use to learn, and to make better decisions.
How I help
Focus
Define priorities, sequence milestones, and say no to the rest.
Fundraising
Sharpen the narrative, tighten the materials, and navigate investor conversations.
Tech decisions
Evaluate technical paths and de-risk R&D and product choices.
Background
I've spent more than twenty years moving between deep technical work and the business decisions that turn it into something real. My path runs through national labs, universities, two startups, and now a global foundation, giving me an unusually broad view of how technology actually gets built, funded, and scaled.
I hold a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin and Université Paul Cézanne (desalination and membrane processes), an M.S. in Environmental Engineering from UT Austin, and an MBA in Finance and Sustainability from the University of Iowa. I began my career as a process engineer at an early-stage biotech, then spent six years as a project leader and staff scientist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where I built a water treatment research team from the ground up. From there I moved into academia, holding faculty positions at the University of Arkansas and Penn State, where I secured and managed more than $15M in research funding across water, electrochemical energy, and agriculture.
Since 2017 I've also worked directly inside startups. I co-founded CatalyzeH2O, a water treatment venture that moved technology from the lab to commercial scale, and later served as CTO of sHYp, an electrolyzer company, where I built the engineering team and took the technology from TRL 3 to TRL 6 in about a year. I founded Greenlee Consulting in 2019 to bring that combination of technical depth and startup experience directly to early-stage founders.
Today I also serve as Executive Vice President at XPRIZE Foundation, where I am the first person to lead the Food, Water & Waste division. I was hired to lead the launch of a $119M competition focused on accelerating desalination technology, as well as the division's overall operations, strategy, and direction. Since joining, I've been responsible for developing the broader portfolio spanning food, water, and waste, including upcoming projects in crop engineering, flexible plastics, textile waste circularity, manure management, food security, and soil health.
Let's talk
If you're an early-stage founder navigating focus, fundraising, or technology strategy, or if you're interested in the water education initiative, I'd like to hear from you.