Kevin Gordon Mercer is the CEO and Founder of RainGrid.

Since his first experience with a backyard stream in Halifax, the Canadian/Newfoundland expatriate citizen, has always been drawn to water. His twenty-five year career encompasses leading programmatic design of civic green infrastructure for cities across North America, publishing market defining research, and projects – mostly associated with protecting the rain – across a wide field of freshwater protection objectives and outcomes. Today, he is an award-winning executive in the field of freshwater protection, climate resilience, intelligent infrastructure, and ecosystem finance.

Most recently, his focus has been on developing ecosystem credit monetization of the intelligent circular rain technology model #RainGridCities to transition cities’ civic drainage infrastructure into decarbonized and democratized systems that value instead of waste rain.

Kevin has received numerous awards and recognition throughout his career including, most recently, the World Economic Forum UpLink program Top Freshwater Innovator prize, and the Global Forum on Human Settlements’ Global Model of Green Technology prize.

A graduate in political economy from Carleton and Memorial Universities, Kevin spent his early years in federal government oil and gas policy negotiations. Then after grad school, with a writing gig for Pierre Trudeau out of the way, he waded into seven years failing his way through multi-material recycling consulting, Great Lakes pollution prevention, aboriginal self government negotiations, and landfill EA project management before settling into urban rain when he founded RiverSides in 1996. After laying himself off in 2007 he undertook brief stints teaching grad school, contributed to a provincial clean water fund, dabbled in residential land development ESG. Following the devastating 2013 floods in Toronto, he reclaimed his personal rain barrel supply/LID consulting business and morphed it into the rain AI/IoT and fintech firm RainGrid Inc. and the rest is still an evolving story.