Member Spotlight
Meena Sankaran, Founder & CEO – KETOS Inc.
KETOS, Inc is a start-up delivering integrated, cloud-based, IoT solutions for actionable water intelligence through hardware, secure connectivity, and a robust software fabric. Founder & CEO Meena Sankaran talks to us about the recent Newark lead crisis, industry trends, and more.
As one of the newest SWAN Members, can you share how KETOS supports its customers with its water intelligence platform?
At KETOS, we believe that empowering operators with mission-critical water data can transform their businesses. Our solution is a unique intersection of smart connected networks, data analytics (predictive intelligence with actionable insights), and water sensing technology (innovative hardware for real-time water monitoring). Users will receive state-of-the-art continuous water quality warnings and predictive analytics of heavy metal toxins, inorganics, and several environmental parameters in a single modular system at lab-precision levels of accuracy and reliability. While the hardware incorporates proprietary patented methods of sensing and automation, the software platform has several innovations to bring the capability of data analytics and the strength of technology to the world of water.
News has recently emerged regarding lead contamination in the Newark water crisis. How can cities use water metrics to prevent similar situations?
Municipalities now can have advanced diagnostics on any lead contamination anomalies before they escalate to liability, provision of bottled water and a city-wide scare on public-health. For example, the KETOS Shield system is one of the first in the industry to provide lab-precision data within EPA-desired sensitivity on an automated basis without the need for manual intervention for 20+ parameters, all within a single system. This solution can be installed strategically across an entire city grid including water treatment plants in order to understand the deterioration of water quality through the distribution cycle. It can also provide operators clear insights of where possible infrastructure issues are occurring such as pipeline corrosion. This allows for for proactive pipe repairs through location-mapped data.
What trends in the smart water industry are you most excited about?
The Internet of Water is here. KETOS has entered the water industry at an inflection point where water operators and businesses are going through a transition and reflection of technological automation, optimisation and adoption across several tiers. We have built a dynamic predictive modeler that not only takes into account all publicly available static data but also the real-time millions of data points. This flow of data allows for potential correlation with seasonality, man-made contamination sources and more opportunities into the future.
Hardware is a means to generating data and the unique capability of detecting, collecting, analysing and presenting heavy metal toxins in real-time is a great start for us. Treatment and storage solutions are great but knowing what’s in our water, in a scalable automated way might be the next step in building a cohesive solution for a smarter, sustainable and safer future.
What advice do you have for young professionals trying to elevate their careers in the water industry?
As a society, we need to increase awareness and optimise overall water availability for future generations. Continuous water quality monitoring now allows for water recycling and enabling water reuse on a larger scale.
KETOS was built in a data-centric world- this allowed an interdisciplinary collaboration of material scientists, physicists, chemists, electromechanical engineers, robotic engineers, data scientists, cloud architects and IoT engineers to enter into the world of water and work on a combined hardware and software solution.
Water is a complex yet quintessential resource, so the need for young professionals to be creative and adaptive of how they apply learning and innovation from other verticals, segments and markets is very important to how we preserve and enhance this resource while uplifting this industry into technological progress.
