In French explorer Jacques Yves Cousteau’s words, “We forget that the water cycle and the life cycle are one.” True enough, water forms the lifeline of any community. However, the actual steps involved in the urban life cycle of water – from sourcing water to its treatment, distribution, collection, to treating wastewater and finally returning the treated water back to the water bodies – largely stay out of public sight. The intricacies of this complex system are handled by utilities, which have assets like pumps, blowers, and mixers that have the potential to provide a lot of data on the water system. Yet, the utilities tend to lack the ability to mine all that data due to the absence of a common platform that integrates all the information on a real-time basis, creating efficiency gaps in water management.

Enter Aquasight – a Troy, Michigan-based water management tech company that provides innovative solutions to all sorts of water management issues. Armed with an industry-first common real-time digital AI platform for mining data from utilities’ assets and boasting of more than 50,000 water utilities – out of which around 2,000 are significant in terms of size and relevance – and 16,000 wastewater management entities, Aquasight is completely focused on handling the entire life cycle of water. “Efficiency, asset intelligence, risk management, determining spending areas, and knowledge retention are the five key themes by which our common digital platform provides value across the entire water life cycle,” says Mahesh Lunani, founder and CEO of Aquasight. Focusing on municipal sources of water, Aquasight addresses the challenges utilities face in gaining information on their assets, like detecting leakages, assessing conditions of pumps and blowers, predicting water quality, and helps them become more proactive than reactive. “We can provide utilities a solution that doesn’t cost as much and is able to deliver the value,” adds Lunani.

Water, Wastewater, and More

Containing five times more energy than what is required to treat it, wastewater forms a crucial portion of the water life cycle. $100 billion are spent each year in maintaining wastewater operations, out of which nearly half is spent on the activated sludge treatment process. Seeking to lower operations and maintenance costs, APOLLO, Aquasight’s wastewater management solution, utilizes AI, asset intelligence and real-time advisors to deliver a comprehensive wastewater management solution to utilities. Lunani mentions an instance where Aquasight implemented AI to provide the correct amount of air to solve the issue of fluctuating air supply during active sludge treatment in a wastewater plant, saving $10,000 per month.