Give First Week: From London to Alabama, One Founder's Long Way Home

Virginia Szepietowski didn't set out to build a wastewater company. She and her husband and co-founder, Chris, got into open water swimming and triathlon training in the UK, kept getting sick from poor water quality, and went looking for why. That question led her to leave a job she loved, spend six months researching water and wastewater treatment in London, and eventually co-found Nyad (Techstars 2025), an AI copilot for the wastewater operators who keep treatment plants safe, efficient, and compliant, an industry facing a wave of retirements just as costs tighten.

Szepietowski walked Techstars Program Manager Sebastian Turano through the company's path at Give First Week, and it wound through three different programs before landing anywhere near a finished product. It started in early 2024 with the Techstars WaterTech & Sustainability Founder Catalyst, run with the Tuscaloosa County Economic Development Authority and the University of Alabama. At that stage, Nyad was still an idea. The goal of the 10-week program wasn't traction, it was figuring out whether the problem was real and painful enough that someone would pay to solve it, and whether the UK, where Szepietowski had struggled to get water companies to engage with anything new, was even the right place to build the company.

The turning point was two weeks in person in Alabama, where the Economic Development Authority connected her directly to potential customers across the state. That warm introduction mattered enormously: a cold email from the UK gets ignored, but a meeting arranged by the state's head of innovation gets taken. At her first industry presentation, she got silence in the room and then a line of people afterward asking her to visit their plants; no one wanted to admit a problem in front of their peers, but privately, plenty of them had one.

From there, Szepietowski and her husband incorporated a U.S. entity, burned through a 90-day non-working visa window doing customer research, and eventually joined the Techstars Columbus Accelerator, powered by The Ohio State University, to build the computer vision technology Nyad needed. She credits Techstars Managing Director Tim Grace and the program's structure, including monthly investor updates and a fundraising strategy session she still calls one of the most impactful hours of her career, with helping close a funding round when three separate pieces of momentum lined up in a single week: visas, a project win, and pitch competition backing.

Nyad ultimately put down roots in Birmingham, Alabama, not Ohio or the UK, because the wastewater industry runs on in-person, relationship-driven trust, and Alabama's mix of a growing startup ecosystem, lower costs, and genuine local pride in water quality made it the right fit. The company has now commercially launched, operates in six states, closed a funding round in December with a team of seven, and has secured more than $1.8 million in equity and grant funding, with its sights set on enterprise contracts next.