Jairo Trad
He was born in Luyaba, a town in the Traslasierra Valley, 160 kilometers from the city of Córdoba, and today he leads the company that sells saved water to Google, Microsoft, Intel and Coca-Cola. Jairo Trad is a computer engineer, co-founder and CEO of Kilimo, a climate-tech company that uses satellite data and artificial intelligence to tell farmers how much and when to irrigate, and that turned those water savings into an asset corporations buy to meet their water targets. Argentina’s national government named him Entrepreneur of the Year in 2018. Six years later, he raised a $7.5 million Series A.
From a previous failure to an idea with a market
Trad and his partners did not come to water out of an environmental vocation. They had already started a technology venture for agriculture, with a first attempt that failed, and decided to try again in the same field for a practical reason: it is an industry in which Argentina competes on its own merits and where technology adoption was already established.
Irrigation emerged as the point with the greatest leverage. Agriculture accounts for around 70% of the freshwater consumed by humanity, so even a marginal improvement in that use has a systemic effect. Before writing a single line of code, the team spent six months traveling around Argentina and interviewing farmers to understand what they needed. Kilimo was founded in 2014, supported by the Córdoba Acelera program of the Innovar y Emprender Agency, and with a name taken from Swahili, where the word means agriculture.
A system that does not depend on sensors in the field
The platform combines satellite information, weather data and field observations to calculate the actual evapotranspiration of a crop: the sum of what evaporates from the soil and what the plant transpires. That figure, measured daily, makes it possible to build a water balance for the field and send the farmer a notification through the web or an app specifying the millimeters or hours of irrigation required and when to apply them.
The technical decision Trad defends most strongly is the absence of hardware in the field. If a sensor breaks, someone has to travel to the farm to repair it, which is slow and expensive in regions where customers may be two thousand kilometers apart. By calculating the measurement from satellite data, Kilimo can estimate the water consumption of any open-field crop anywhere in the world without installing anything.
The other design rule is deliberately asymmetric: ask the farmer for as little data as possible and return as much processed information as possible. The farmer records rainfall or irrigation with two taps and receives a concrete recommendation. Early measurements of the company’s impact showed improvements of up to 30% in yields and up to 70% in water-use efficiency.
The commercial invention: paying farmers not to use water
The underlying obstacle was not technical. Trad describes it as an assumption of zero value: the water bill does not reflect what the resource is actually worth, particularly in agriculture, because no country wants to make food production more expensive. Without a real price, there is no incentive to conserve it, and without an incentive, no technology gets adopted.
After a year of conversations with different players in the sector, the team discovered that corporations were already buying water savings, an instrument technically known as volumetric water benefits and related to carbon credits, although with a restriction that makes it more demanding: replenishment has to take place in the same watershed where the company consumes water. A company cannot consume in Buenos Aires and compensate in Entre Ríos.
Kilimo built its model around that logic. It provides farmers with service for a year in the watersheds where its corporate customers operate, measures how much water they saved at the end of the period and pays them financial compensation for those savings. Trad claims Kilimo was the first company in the world to pay a farmer to conserve water. Farmers’ initial reaction, he says, was complete disbelief: nobody had ever offered them anything like it.
On the corporate side, the sales argument does not rely on goodwill. Companies have quantified how much money is at risk because of water scarcity or excess, and unlike other climate variables whose impact is projected into the future, water is material today: without water, there is no production. Kilimo works with the VWBA methodology, the global standard for volumetric water-benefit accounting, with third-party verification so that every reported cubic meter can be audited.
Teaching before selling
The first problem they faced was one of awareness, not product: they had to explain why irrigation management matters. The response was the Irrigation Academy, a free initiative that at one point offered three webinars a week and trained more than 150,000 farmers across Latin America. Forty percent are micro and small-scale producers and 25% are women. Half of the company’s customers come from there.
Trad explains the effort with an observation about the nature of the business. An urban technology company works with relatively homogeneous users concentrated in major cities; in agriculture, every case has its own local conditions and customers are dispersed. The academy helps establish a common baseline of knowledge.
The 2024 round and the revenue map
In June 2024, Kilimo closed a $7.5 million Series A led by Emerald Technology Ventures, an industrial innovation fund that manages, among other vehicles, the world’s largest fund specialized in water. The Yield Lab Latam, Salkantay Ventures, Kamay Ventures and iThink VC also participated. The capital was intended to strengthen local presence in key markets and develop products to support the scaling of its conservation model.
The revenue distribution Trad detailed at the time changes the way the business is understood. Mexico contributes around 40%, Chile 30%, Argentina 20%, and the remainder is divided among Brazil, Uruguay and Peru. Mexico is its main market and, according to Trad’s own projection, will remain so. The company expected to double revenue for the third consecutive year.
The geography of the business follows the geography of water stress. Central and northern Mexico are experiencing severe drought, and the capital came close to the so-called Day Zero. In Chile, most of the population, manufacturing output and a significant share of agriculture are concentrated around Santiago, in an overburdened watershed within an area undergoing desertification. In Argentina, where more than half of the territory is under some degree of drought, Kilimo has projects in Entre Ríos, Corrientes, Mendoza, Neuquén and Buenos Aires.
Leadership built without an office
The team consists of 55 people spread across 25 cities in the region, working entirely remotely except when they need to go into the field to speak with farmers. Trad’s explanation turns the traditional management manual upside down: he prefers being close to customers rather than inside an office. The executive structure combines the founders with profiles added later, including a Peruvian economist with an MBA from Madrid in charge of strategy and new business, and an international-relations specialist leading water and climate partnerships.
His view of the climate problem explains where he is pushing the company. He argues that reducing emissions is essential but insufficient, because the rise in temperature can no longer be completely contained, and that the other half of the work is adaptation, with water at its center. He uses an image he often repeats in interviews: if the climate crisis were a shark, water would be its teeth, the concrete way in which we feel it. He also describes it as a collective-action problem, where isolated individual efforts are not enough.
The next goals he has outlined are to consolidate Mexico and Chile, scale in Brazil and open operations in the southern United States and southern Spain. The purpose the company set for itself years ago remains the same and serves as its business thesis: transforming the value of water.
