Cambridge Lakehouse

Cambridge Lakehouse Ltd spun out of the University of Cambridge in March 2025.

We aim to become an environmental exposure company with global reach.

Our focus is in-home water, and all data is versioned to ensure suitability for a variety of actuarial, healthcare and development use cases. Our flagship product is WaterGraph (pilots: Greater London and Hampshire, UK).

We believe that our quantitative approach to environmental exposure has value for outcomes-funded initiatives. We are committed to global lead reduction, and to exploring development applications in low- and middle-income countries.

Product

WaterGraph.

The UK’s first systematic study of drinking water at point of use.

Statutory monitoring covers the grid, but the UK’s in-home water remains a black box. We believe that’s a concern in a country with the oldest housing stock in Europe, where an estimated 9 million homes are still served by lead pipes.1

WaterGraph offers consumers regular monitoring against nine parameters. These results are aggregated to form our proprietary Household Water Exposure Score (HWES). These household scores can then be compiled, and integrated with public data, to form our Area Water Exposure Score (AWES). Houses achieving a Household Water Exposure Score (HWES) of >60 receive a renewable kitemark, the WaterMark.

Our first-generation product, with manual testing, is currently piloting in Greater London and Hampshire, UK. Our proprietary sensor, which will permit live monitoring, is being developed in partnership with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College, London.

Consumer product Visit WaterGraph

Test your home water and join the pilot at watergraph.co.uk.

Estimate of homes affected by lead pipes (Hayes, 2010), as cited in Jarvis, Quy, Macadam, Jacobs & Smith (2018), Intake of lead (Pb) from tap water of homes with leaded and low lead plumbing systems, Science of the Total Environment, 644, 1346–1356. ↩

Team

The people behind Cambridge Lakehouse.

Benjie Fraser

Co-Founder & Chairman

Benjie brings over three decades of experience in financial services, asset servicing and institutional investment to his role as Chairman. His career spans some of the world’s leading financial institutions, including 15 years at J.P. Morgan as Managing Director and Global Pensions Executive, where he held oversight of the asset servicing of $2.2 trillion in pension assets worldwide. Prior to that, he held senior roles at State Street, Bank of New York and Boston Safe Mellon.

Throughout his career, Benjie has been a prominent voice on the issues shaping institutional investment, from ESG and stewardship to data governance, regulatory change and the evolving responsibilities of asset owners. He has spoken at industry events across Europe, Australia, Japan, the Middle East, the US and beyond, and has been a consistent advocate for better alignment between asset owners, managers and issuers to drive long-term, sustainable value.

Hugh Fraser

Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Hugh is a serial entrepreneur who joins Cambridge Lakehouse from Doorway.io, where as Co-Founder, Managing Partner and CISO he took the company from early concept to over $1 million in annual recurring revenue. With a background spanning technology, security and client experience, he brings a founder’s instinct for identifying friction in established processes and building elegant solutions to replace them.

His experience across multiple early-stage ventures has given Hugh a sharp appreciation of what it takes to bring new products to market, build teams and win the trust of enterprise clients. At Doorway, he championed a digital-first approach to professional relationships, helping organisations move beyond outdated contact methods towards seamless, secure and sustainable alternatives.

Dr Ralph St Clair Wade

Head of Research

Ralph has built a career at the intersection of academia and industry. He was formerly the Managing Partner of CambridgeCultura Ltd, a research and insights spinout. He led the organisation to accreditation with the Crown Commercial Service, and built a client book including a serving head of government, a UK cabinet minister, a portfolio of leading communications companies, and a series of tech unicorns in Amsterdam and New York.

Ralph has been recognised as a Virgin Empower100 founder with a deep interest in the social consequences of industrial transformation. His anti-deepfake strategy, designed in partnership with DeepMind psychologist Dr Matija Franklin, assisted in the free and fair conduct of the 2024 UK General Election. He was formerly a Cambridge-funded visiting specialist at UNESCO, Paris, where he worked to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis on the City of Venice.

Ralph remains active in academia, as an Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. The youngest doctoral graduand in a decade, Ralph held graduate and foundation scholarships at St John’s College, Cambridge. His thesis was praised by one examiner as ‘an outstanding piece of work … a tour de force’. He achieved the highest mark in the University at MPhil (2018, with Distinction), and took a BA (2017) with double-first class honours. He is currently George C Clark Visiting Fellow at the Huntington Institution, Los Angeles.

Operations & Support

Tristan Mahé SEO Growth Lead

Eliza Hoogewerf Finance Director

Lynn Read Executive Assistant to the Chairman

Advisors

A scientific advisory network.

Cambridge Lakehouse draws on the expertise of specialists at both Cambridge University and Imperial College, London. Our methodologies and proprietary technologies are devised and stress-tested by a core group of academic advisors.

Dr Tom Rowan

Assistant Professor, Imperial College London

Tom has nearly seven years of experience advancing simulation tools and field instrumentation for water systems. His research integrates low-cost sensor design and AI to address complex pollution and water security challenges, working across interdisciplinary teams spanning policy, infrastructure and environmental engineering.

His recent published work, highlighted by the American Geophysical Union, demonstrated that low-cost self-potential sensor networks could provide real-time early warning of saltwater intrusion into coastal freshwater supplies, ahead of detectable salinity changes.

Tom is a Director of HydroHammer, a start-up developing zero-power hydraulic ram pumping systems with IP protection, grant funding and field pilots. He is also a Beloe Fellow of the Worshipful Company of Scientific Instrument Makers, and holds a patent for an electronic ram pump controller.

Tom completed his PhD in Fluid Mechanics at Durham University, where his research focused on dam break simulations, shallow water flows and waterborne steering mechanisms. He subsequently held postdoctoral positions at Durham and Imperial before his current appointment.

Professor Adrian Butler

Professor of Subsurface Hydrology, Imperial College London

Adrian is Professor of Subsurface Hydrology in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Imperial College London. His research focuses on measuring, analysing and modelling subsurface water flow and contaminant transport, with a particular interest in the Chalk aquifers of Southern England, including those relevant to the New Forest.

He works in close collaboration with the British Geological Survey and CEH Wallingford, and is Principal Investigator on the NERC-funded CAMELLIA project, co-developing practical solutions with environmental, engineering and planning stakeholders.

His combination of deep field expertise, long-standing institutional partnerships and applied research focus makes Adrian a significant addition to the Cambridge Lakehouse advisory network.