About
Built to come back up.
AquaAether started with a simple question from a mining engineer: if the ocean can do the hard work of desalination at 400 metres, why does every service call still need a ship and ROV? The answer became a platform that returns plant & equipment home.
Team
Meet the team behind AquaAether
Neil Hellmann
Co-founder, Inventor
Neil is a mining engineer (BSc, University of the Witwatersrand, 1984) and the inventor of the AquaAether platform. In 1990 he founded Vereguard, a distributor of Scandinavian products to the composites industry that became a key trading partner with Norway. From 2000 he was CEO of CHC Group and built it into a leading Southern African manufacturer and distributor for the chemical, plastics and mining sectors. He is a member of YPO/WPO and has spent his career developing new products.
Andrew Douglas
Co-founder, Commercial
Andrew is Managing Partner of Douglas Day, a first-cheque investor in early-stage ClimateTech, and Managing Director of The Salamander Co. The two work as a pair. Douglas Day writes the first cheque and assembles co-investors; The Salamander Co. develops commercialisation strategies for Douglas Day portfolio companies. Andrew is Head: Go-to-Market Strategy at RanMarine and Producer of SWEAT Africa.
Yousef Bazian
Co-founder, Market access
Yousef has more than 30 years in corporate finance and business development across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He worked at Citibank, HSBC and Arthur Andersen, led PwC’s Middle East Corporate Finance division and was CEO of Aperture Group in Qatar. In 2018 he founded Mena Square Advisory, and he chairs Fintech International and Loita Transaction Services. A Yarmouk University graduate, he sits on several boards and foundations.
