Water analytics startup Ketos has announced it raised $18 million in funding. It is part of a growing effort to use progress in AI to automate important parts of our lives, such as drinking water safety.
It takes 13,737 to 21,926 gallons of water to produce a car, according to the Grace Communications Foundation.
Ketos’ suite principally targets industrial and agricultural enterprises and leverages sensors and an AI-driven backend to prevent contaminants from seeping into water supply lines.
“The Ketos platform has the ability to correlate time-series data across a wide variety of vectors, contamination sources, and water sources like well water, surface water, and watersheds that are location-mapped,” Sankaran explained in an email to VentureBeat.
“This ability allows for advanced contamination models with the potential to study health impacts across a ZIP code over decades. AI and machine-based learning also provides better historical context to water operations, process optimization, and advanced diagnostics for maintenance-related predictions.
To date, we have collected over 13 million data points across a variety of applications including agriculture, industrial, and municipal in the U.S. alone.” Broadly speaking, Ketos offers recommendations about proactive repairs, and the company’s self-powered Wave Fabric product displays water supply management and utilization data in real time.
Ketos can deliver predictive insights on water distribution and over 20 parameters like flow and pressure.
Because Wave Fabric sites inline in water systems, it can be configured to automatically shut off flow when a leak is detected.
Shield Fabric and Wave Fabric continuously exchange water data over an end-to-end encrypted mesh network via Hub.
Ketos claims its customers in 13 U.S. states, India, Mexico, and Canada have analyzed over a million water quality tests across more than 130 deployments in India, Mexico, and the U.S., and that its services have helped to reduce the costs of water sample testing by 90%. Last September, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and Las Vegas Valley Water District introduced a pilot program to monitor the region’s drinking water for toxins and heavy-metal compounds using Ketos’ EPA-compliant platform.
More recently, agriculture technology company Dramm Corporation and water treatment solution provider Water Engineering inked strategic partnerships with Ketos to offer insights to facilities for stakeholders across the Canada and Midwestern U.S. And Ketos says it’s partnering with institutions including Columbia, Stanford, and the University of California, Berkeley to “Make contributions with a broader societal impact,” like the water safety kit the company created for home, business, and school users.