Client story · Fractional CFO

Loowatt: the Bill Gates backed sanitation technology company.

In at the start of the scaling phase, and still there years later as the technology sold to countries around the world.

Loowatt team member in front of the company’s branding

What the position owned

Not advice. Ownership.

Scaling finance

Joined as the company moved from proving the technology to selling it, and built the finance function that scale demands.

Selling to the world

Supported deals across multiple countries, each with its own currency, tax and reporting reality.

The long haul

Fractional does not mean brief. The position stayed for years because the work kept compounding.

The company

What Loowatt actually does.

Loowatt is a London sanitation technology company that builds waterless flush toilets. The toilet seals waste into a lined container beneath the floor with no water and no smell; when the container fills, a service team swaps it out. The waste does not go to landfill, it becomes feedstock for anaerobic digestion, coming back out the other end as biogas and fertiliser.

The product is not really the toilet. It is sanitation as a service: hardware, a servicing operation and a waste-to-value chain, sold as a running system. Loowatt has operated in Madagascar since a 2012 trial in Antananarivo, with local partners converting the collected waste, and runs a paid household service in Durban, South Africa under the Kaloola brand.

The market

Densely populated urban areas that the sewer never reached, a market where the alternative is a pit latrine, not a cheaper competitor. In the Durban pilot, more than a hundred informal-settlement households paid a monthly fee for the service, run with partners including Khanyisa Projects, the Water Research Commission and Unilever’s Transform programme. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation backed the technology with a $1.27M grant in 2013.

The business, on one page

The canvas.

Customers

Households in off-grid urban settlements paying a monthly service fee, and the municipalities and programmes that co-fund city-scale sanitation.

Value proposition

A dignified flush toilet with no water and no sewer, serviced weekly, with waste turned into biogas and fertiliser instead of contamination.

Channels & partners

Local service operators and delivery partners, GasyGrow in Madagascar; Khanyisa Projects, the Water Research Commission and Unilever Transform in South Africa.

Revenue

Monthly household subscriptions (about R350 a month in the Durban service), plus partner and programme funding for city rollouts.

Key resources

The patented sealing toilet hardware, the servicing logistics operation, and the waste-to-value processing chain.

Cost structure

Hardware manufacture, a labour-heavy collection and swap operation, and processing infrastructure, unit economics live or die on route density.

The position’s default plays

What a great CFO does in a company like this.

01Prices the route, not the toilet. The unit of economics is a serviced household on a collection route. A great CFO models cost per swap by route density and knows exactly how many households make a neighbourhood profitable.
02Separates hardware capital from service revenue. Toilets are capex, subscriptions are recurring revenue. Mixing them hides whether the service actually earns. Split them and the real business shows.
03Turns grant funding into an audit trail. Gates-scale funders ask for evidence. Collecting it as you go, not in a panic before a report, is the difference between one grant and a pipeline of them.
04Builds the currency picture. Revenue in rand and ariary, costs partly in pounds. Currency swings can erase a year of operational progress; the CFO hedges what can be hedged and prices the rest in.
05Makes the subsidy story investable. Household fees plus programme funding is a blended model. A great CFO shows investors which part stands on its own feet and the credible path to more of it.

Coverage

Backed by the Bill Gates foundation ecosystem, sold to governments around the world, and the numbers had to work in every one of them.

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**Georgina King***Executive Partnership Manager*

Position Imaging: a US technology powerhouse

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