William Janssen

Co-Founder

William Janssen co-founded Desolenator, which developed a solar thermal desalination system that produces distilled drinking water from seawater or brackish water using sunlight as its only energy input, and which the company describes as a circular solar thermal desalination process. He trained as a mechanical engineer and spent the early part of his career managing large infrastructure projects, building airport terminals in East Asia and the Middle East, before founding and scaling exhibition design businesses in the United Arab Emirates and Asia. Across more than 25 years his work has run through design, business development and impact entrepreneurship, and he holds several international patents in solar thermal desalination and in energy recovery from salinity gradients. The company has since moved from prototype to deployments with partners including the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, Silal and Booking.com. He divides his time between the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates.