Eurazeo agrees to acquire majority stake in Spain's Miya Water

Eurazeo has agreed to acquire a majority stake in Miya Water, a Madrid-based provider of water-efficiency systems for utilities, in a transaction the French firm says will support the company's international expansion and accelerate a platform built to help utilities cut the water they lose before it reaches customers. The acquisition is the fourth from the Eurazeo Planetary Boundaries Fund, an impact buyout strategy launched in 2024 to back businesses that reverse or adapt to breaches of planetary boundaries; Eurazeo has sized the fund at €750 million, and Miya's founders and management will keep driving the company strategically while remaining significant co-investors. No development bank, guarantee or concessional tranche appears in the deal.

Eurazeo ties the investment to three of the fund's boundaries: freshwater change, because Miya limits the abstraction, treatment and pumping of water; pollution, because it diverts organic pollution from rivers into wastewater treatment systems; and climate change, through the emissions avoided when water no longer has to be abstracted, treated or pumped.

Miya's commercial target is non-revenue water — the volume a utility produces and then loses to leaks, theft or metering error before it can be billed. Founded in 2007, the company has implemented more than 200 projects across five continents, and Eurazeo puts the scale of the problem at an estimated 126 billion cubic meters a year, enough to meet the annual water needs of hundreds of millions of people. Ageing networks, pressure on water resources and the effects of climate change, the firm says, are turning leakage into an investment theme.

Eurazeo has run a version of this playbook recently: in September it assembled a €150 million circular-IT platform around the acquisition of Flex IT, joining a corporate collection business to a reseller network of roughly 13,000 across Europe. The Miya announcement reaches for the same kind of scale, with Miya executive chairman Noam Komy framing the aim as a wider international water services platform grown from the expertise that established the company.

From the transition-finance side, this is a bet on ownership rather than on a label. Sustainability-linked lending contracted once the label stopped pricing risk, and the transition pipeline drifted toward unlabeled project finance; taking a control stake in the company that does the water-loss work reaches the same physical outcome by a different route, because the water saved and the emissions avoided do not depend on what the financing is called.

That absence sets the deal apart from the pattern in which public balance sheets absorb early-stage transition risk and private lenders follow at scale. A private impact fund holds the control position and carries the equity risk, with Miya's founders and management staying in as co-investors; no financial terms were reported, so the price and structure of the stake remain undisclosed.

Against losses running to 126 billion cubic meters a year, a €750 million fund can prove a model at a handful of companies but cannot finance the fix at the scale of the problem. Miya is only the fourth position since the fund's 2024 launch, and the announcement does not report how much of that target has been raised or committed, or how many further investments the strategy expects to hold.

Erwann Le Ligné and Wilfried Piskula, the managing partners who co-head EPBF, describe water efficiency as one of the defining infrastructure challenges of the coming decades and Miya as uniquely placed to shape the sector worldwide, a claim the company's 200-project record and the fund's four investments will either support or not. How much capital EPBF eventually reports against that target, and how soon, will say more about the strategy's reach than any statement issued at signing.