Atoco
Table of Contents

⚠ Disclaimer: This entry may be incomplete, out of date, or inaccurate. It is AI-maintained on a best-effort basis. Do not rely on it as a sole source — verify claims independently using the sources listed below.

Summary

Atoco is a climate technology company headquartered in Irvine, California, commercializing reticular-chemistry (metal-organic framework) research from founder Omar Yaghi — the 2025 Nobel laureate in Chemistry — into atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) and carbon capture products. Its AWH line uses MOF-801-style porous materials to pull potable water directly from air humidity, including in arid regions below 20% relative humidity, and is targeting commercial rollout of containerized industrial units in late 2026.

Key Facts

  • Founded by: Prof. Omar Yaghi (UC Berkeley); exact founding year not stated on company materials reviewed — third-party company trackers place it around 2020–2021 (unverified)
  • Type: Company (private)
  • Status: Active — pre-commercial, targeting commercial rollout of AWH hardware in late 2026
  • HQ: Irvine, California (Orange County); regional commercial office in Dubai, UAE
  • Core technology: Reticular chemistry / metal-organic framework (MOF) sorbent materials, applied to both atmospheric water harvesting and carbon capture (post-combustion capture and direct air capture)
  • Products: On-grid AWH systems (low-electricity, grid-integrated) and off-grid AWH systems (ambient-energy powered, no external power source required)
  • Key metric(s): On-grid units targeted at ~2,000–4,000 liters of high-purity water per day per unit; off-grid units up to ~1,000 liters per day; operates at relative humidity below 20%

What It Is / How It Works

Atoco was founded to commercialize decades of reticular chemistry research from Omar Yaghi’s lab at UC Berkeley — the science of engineering porous crystalline materials (metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs) with atomic-level precision to capture specific molecules. The company applies this to two climate-facing product lines: atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) and carbon capture (both point-source post-combustion capture and direct air capture).

For AWH, Atoco’s systems use nano-engineered reticular materials — MOFs in the lineage of Yaghi’s MOF-801 and related zirconium-based frameworks — to adsorb water vapor directly from air, including in arid climates with relative humidity below 20% where cooling-condensation atmospheric water generators are largely ineffective (condensation-based AWGs require air to be cooled to its dew point, which is impractical at very low absolute humidity). Atoco offers two product lines: on-grid systems, which use minimal grid electricity and are designed to be portable and scalable from handheld to industrial units for indoor or outdoor deployment; and off-grid systems, which run entirely on ambient energy (such as passive solar heating) with no external power source, targeting isolated or infrastructure-poor locations. The company has publicly tested its technology in Death Valley, California — one of the driest locations on Earth — with founder Omar Yaghi demonstrating water production there.

Beyond direct water production, Atoco is positioning its AWH technology for controlled-environment agriculture (CEA): greenhouses and indoor farms that need supplemental, decentralized water sources and are increasingly co-located with industrial or data center sites where low-grade waste heat is otherwise discarded. Company representatives have described a vision of greenhouses as water/energy “nodes” that capture industrial waste heat to drive water production, creating water-positive indoor farming operations. The company frames AWH as a supplementary source to sit alongside desalination and wastewater reuse rather than a full replacement for existing water infrastructure.

Atoco’s laboratories and manufacturing facilities are based in Irvine, California, with a regional commercial office in Dubai, UAE — reflecting a go-to-market emphasis on arid Gulf-region markets alongside domestic US deployment.

Notable Developments

  • 2026-05: Atoco demonstrated an on-grid AWH commercial prototype at its Orange County, California headquarters in an exclusive feature for Bloomberg News, showing a containerized unit generating water from ambient air.
  • 2026-01: Product Market Specialist Han Park outlined Atoco’s push into controlled-environment agriculture at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit Dubai, describing plans for field tests of containerized industrial AWH prototypes ahead of a targeted late-2026 commercial rollout, with on-grid units expected to produce roughly 2,000–4,000 liters of water per day and off-grid units up to 1,000 liters per day.
  • 2025-10: Founder Omar Yaghi was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson) for the development of metal-organic frameworks — directly increasing commercial and press attention on Atoco’s AWH and carbon capture products.

Key People

Prof. Omar Yaghi — Founder & Chief Science Officer

  • LinkedIn: Not found (no verified personal LinkedIn profile; public presence is primarily academic/institutional)
  • Background: James and Neeltje Tretter Chair Professor of Chemistry, UC Berkeley (since 2012); Founding Director, Berkeley Global Science Institute; Co-Director, Kavli Energy NanoSciences Institute; formerly head of the Center for Reticular Materials at NIMS, Tsukuba, Japan (2009–2016). Originator of the field of reticular chemistry and of MOF-801. Author of 300+ peer-reviewed papers with 205,000+ citations (h-index 175). 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Susumu Kitagawa and Richard Robson); also holds the 2018 Wolf Prize in Chemistry, 2022 VinFuture Prize, and 2024 Tang Prize in Sustainable Development, among 55+ awards.
  • ⚑ Shared founder: Yaghi also founded WaHa (Water Harvesting Inc.) in 2018 — earlier than Atoco — to commercialize the same UC Berkeley MOF patent portfolio. WaHa was later recapitalized under new operating leadership but continues to credit Yaghi as co-founder.

Dr. Samer Taha — Chief Executive Officer

  • LinkedIn: samer-taha
  • Background: PhD in Electrical Engineering, Penn State University. Began as an R&D scientist at Intel (Oregon), 5 years. Founded and led two ICT startups (2007–2017) delivering $200M+ in projects. Served as Executive Chairman of Revonence, a private equity holding group, shifting its focus to nanotechnology commercialization; co-founded ventures with Nobel laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart, including work (2018–2020) commercializing CD-MOF (cyclodextrin-based MOF) technology and building an Irvine, California manufacturing facility for large-scale CD-MOF synthesis. Co-founded and leads Atoco’s commercialization of Yaghi’s research.

Prof. Grant Glover — Vice President of Technology Partnerships

  • LinkedIn: t-grant-glover-6059bb18
  • Background: Associate Professor, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, University of South Alabama, where he has run a research group on mixed-gas adsorption and porous materials since 2012. B.S., Georgia Institute of Technology; PhD, Vanderbilt University; postdoctoral fellowship, UCLA. Editor of Gas Adsorption in Metal Organic Frameworks: Fundamentals and Applications (CRC/Taylor & Francis, 2018). Previously a Defense Department contractor at SAIC/Leidos studying filtration of toxic compounds from air.

Dr. Benjie Limketkai — Vice President of R&D

  • LinkedIn: Not found
  • Background: PhD in Materials Science and Engineering, MIT; BS in Electrical Engineering, Caltech. 7 years as lead research scientist at Intel Labs (organic nanotechnology). Led R&D collaboration (2015–2020) with Nobel laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart commercializing organic nanomaterials for skincare applications; subsequently led R&D and manufacturing at Noble Panacea Labs (from 2020).
  • ⚑ Shared background: Limketkai and CEO Samer Taha both worked with Nobel laureate Sir Fraser Stoddart on MOF commercialization (2015–2020 and 2018–2020, respectively) before joining Atoco.

Magnus Bach — Vice President of Marketing & Business Development

  • LinkedIn: Not found
  • Background: MBA, ESCP Business School (Paris); MA, University of Copenhagen. 20+ years in international B2B commercial roles. Danish Trade Council, Beijing (2004); Emborg, Shanghai (2005); Vestas (2007–2022), most recently as VP Marketing (2017–2022). Has worked in China, the US, Spain, Sweden, Denmark, and is now based in Dubai, UAE.

People — Last Reviewed: 2026-07-15

Claim Verification

Claim: “Atoco’s on-grid AWH units produce approximately 2,000 to 4,000 liters of high-purity water per day”

Status: Partially verified

Supporting sources:

  • AgNavigator — reports this figure based on statements from Atoco’s Product Market Specialist Han Park at an industry conference
  • Atoco press release (Bloomberg feature) — references a unit “that can produce 4,000 liters daily,” consistent with the upper end of the range

Refuting / questioning sources: None found; no independent (non-Atoco-sourced) field measurement of a deployed unit’s output has been published as of this review.

Summary: Consistently reported across company and independent trade-press sources, but the figure comes from company statements about prototype/target performance rather than independently verified field data from commercially deployed units.

Claim: “Atoco’s off-grid AWH units produce up to 1,000 liters of water per day using only ambient energy, with no external power source”

Status: Partially verified

Supporting sources:

Refuting / questioning sources: None found independently verifying the 1,000 L/day figure under specific field conditions (humidity, temperature); “ambient energy” is consistent with the underlying MOF-801-style passive solar heating mechanism (see MOF-801), but company materials do not disclose testing conditions for this specific figure.

Summary: Plausible given the underlying MOF thermal-swing mechanism, but the specific 1,000 L/day figure is a company claim not yet corroborated by independent field testing data.

Claim: “Atoco was founded by 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry laureate Omar Yaghi to commercialize MOF technology”

Status: Verified

Supporting sources:

Summary: Well-verified across company and independent sources.

Sources

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