Mareen Schneider is Founder and Managing Director of Grasshopper Water Infrastructure Projects & Investments GmbH, based in Frankfurt. She is a fully qualified lawyer with a focus on capital markets law and international commercial law. “Socialized as a child of the Frankfurt capital market,” her career led her early into hands-on capital markets practice, for example in closed-end funds, prospectus drafting, IPOs, securitizations, and M&A, initially in large international law firms and subsequently as a partner in her own specialized law firm.

Fascinated by how investment structures can enable real change and make solutions to the major challenges of our time investable, the idea of founding Grasshopper emerged alongside part-time academic work up to 2009. This was driven by the conviction that clean water is one of the central infrastructure challenges of our time, and by the realization that despite its enormous need, the water sector has to date received far too little private capital.

The “funding gap in water” is immense. So far, only around 2 percent of global investments in the water sector come from private sources. The goal therefore was and remains to establish water as an investable, new asset class, not through abstract products, but through concrete, investor-ready water projects.

Over the past 17 years, Grasshopper has built a distinctive project model to achieve this. The company develops modular, standardized, and scalable “technology-only” projects for central and decentralized water infrastructure as well as for selected applications in the private sector.

The de-risking approach is consistent. Grasshopper focuses on clearly delineated technologies for water treatment and supply and deliberately excludes project elements that typically involve long amortization periods and classic construction risks. This results in investor-ready building blocks that are standardized, scalable, and designed with manageable project durations.

On this basis, Grasshopper has step by step built a robust track record over the past 17 years, with steadily growing water projects and project sizes now exceeding 1,000 MLD, across a total of 13 countries to date.

For professional investors and family offices, this means access to investor-ready projects in a new, highly relevant asset class, with a clear risk logic, scalability, and measurable SDG impact.