Hi, everybody. We’re running out of water, and we’re running out of time. In one in four cities fall under heavy water stress zones, and more than $500 billion is at risk on water security issues for industrials annually. Now, we’re engulfed with PFAS. I think we’ve heard that term rolled around quite a bit. Now, that’s a group of over 5,000 synthetic chemicals that are completely affecting our planet, our ecosystem, and all of our livelihood.
By the way, today when I was walking around with Andy. Andy, not on your phone. But he made a comment about how would it be if the water would actually tell us what it needs, and how would we do something about it. So here’s a perfect thought for you.
I grew up in Mumbai, and my experience in scarcity was actually not a statistic, it was a sound. The clang of that steel bucket at 5:00 a.m. in the morning when we’re rationing water by the hour. Boiling four times, and later drinking, and how we were doing it. But we test water like it’s still 1950s. And I’m not talking about developing nations, I’m talking about the US as well as UK. Anglian Water, Thames Water, Southern Water. Still manual sampling, still manual analysis. I had maybe 15 waterborne illnesses before I was even 15, so I did not get COVID. It’s probably my immune system was just confused.
But I think the bigger part of it is, how do we redefine water intelligence? So welcome to the future of water intelligence. What we have been able to do is really create a new discipline for water, where every safety, like visibility of every drop of that water is really understood and is in our fingertips. It’s the first of its kind in terms of being able to monitor 38 parameters and growing within a single system. We have developed over 50 sensing techniques entirely in-house.
What you see behind me is the actual robotic system. It’s called the KETOS SHIELD. It’s one of the first fully integrated tech stack. So it’s a robot. Everything you could possibly imagine as a lab scientist is operating inside the box. My five-year-old calls it as, “Oh, KETOS robots are protecting our water.” And so that system, along with a combination of a robust AI-driven platform and along with a lot of material sensing innovation.
So what you see behind now are real customers. These are deployments across nine countries. We’re monitoring about 242 billion gallons of water. We have been able to reduce 38,000 metric tons of carbon. But the bigger thing for all of you to think about is we have been able to create around 1.8 million anomalies, which have helped avoid $3 billion in fines. Now, think about what that would have happened. What would have happened if all of that waste and toxicity was in the water and we had not caught it, right? So to be able to generate that level, and that’s just scratching the surface. It’s barely scratching the surface.
And so now we have the largest water quality data lake in the world. It’s over 282 million data insights at this point, and we’re essentially making it one of the largest databases for empowering people, so you’re able to look at that data.
So whether it’s war zones, which we have a lot to talk about, or hostile environments, or our power-hungry data centers feeding the AI need, water is critical. The whole mindset of ignorance is bliss cannot be tolerated. We cannot forget water as a resource. Climate marketing was very sexy. Water just never fit it. Water was never even in that bill. So even power is far ahead compared to water. So we really need some more water advocates and water ambassadors.
So looking at this, KETOS is the first shop as a one-stop place for all water intelligence. So if you’re thinking about autonomous monitoring with robotics, or you’re looking at the next generation of tracking emerging contaminants and microbials, we have a lab, which is our KETOS-owned lab, as well as the entire database of being able to access data in your fingertips.
So I’m here representing KETOS because I want to turn every drop of water from a liability to an asset. So the future we’re building is about changing every pipe, every infrastructure facility, every manufacturing plant, every farm, as well as every water body for our survival into potentially a monitoring giant. So join me in preserving and protecting our precious resource for our future generations. And while we’re at it, let’s actually prevent a disease outbreak. Thank you for listening.
Verbatim transcript of the talk as delivered, lightly punctuated for readability. Spoken figures are the speaker’s own.
