Built by an operator,
for operators.
Aegis Filtration is a small team building the water filtration distributor we wanted when we were the buyer.
Chris Griffith
Chris Griffith spent eight years at Tesla, most recently running AI operations across a 200-person product organization. The pattern there was simple. Every back-office function people thought required a team, quoting, dispatch, support tail, demand planning, could be run by a small group of senior operators if the systems underneath them were good enough.
Commercial water filtration is a $4B distribution market still run on phone calls and PDFs. The cartridges are commodities. The service is broken. That gap is the whole opportunity.
Chris started Aegis after watching his last facilities team chase cartridge replacements across five vendors for eighteen months and still miss two compliance audits. The thesis is the same one that worked at Tesla. Ship a real product, run the back office tighter than anyone else in the category, and earn the account one location at a time.
He lives in the Bay Area. He answers his email.
Good product. Awful experience.
Commercial water filtration is one of those markets where the product is good and the experience is awful. Pentair, 3M, and Watts make excellent cartridges. The distributors who sell them are running 1995 ERPs, paper invoices, and a sales cycle measured in weeks.
Multi-unit operators have given up on getting one invoice for one account, and they have learned to live with replacement schedules that nobody actually trusts. We think the moat in this category is not the cartridge. It is the operating layer that turns a five-vendor mess into a one-vendor relationship. That is what we are building.
Three rules we run by.
Every customer-facing thing we ship is about cartridges, service, and time-to-replacement. Anything else is back-office detail.
Senior people, small team, deep accounts. We would rather earn ten chains than churn a thousand single-location accounts.
No fake logos, no "trusted by industry leaders." Pre-revenue is pre-revenue. We say so.