Pravega Ventures partners with Fluid Analytics
We’re thrilled to join Fluid Analytics on their journey, as it scales its AI-powered global, sewage pipeline monitoring solutions.
Fluid Analytics is a water analytics company addressing urban water pollution. It leverages AI to help cities and utilities effectively monitor wastewater infrastructure.
Read on below for a peek into our thought…
The Global Picture
We are only now beginning to acknowledge the combined impact of climate change, population pressures and aging infrastructur on quality of life across the world.
Over the past 2 years, the world has seen unseasonal, erratic, and powerful natural disasters, from hurricanes and floods to earthquakes and wildfires. Each of these will require infrastructure and technological mitigants going forward, and vertical/specific solutions will emerge.
The recent emphasis on water conservation, treatment, re-use monitoring has put startups like Fluid Analytics in the spotlight.
The Product
Fluid’s AI/ML powered on-cloud solutions help utilities and pipeline inspection contractors across the world improve sewer inspection productivity manifold:
- 50% reduction in cost of sewer inspections
- 3x increase in productivity
- 10x faster time-to-pipeline rehab
Industry incumbents are still using legacy software-in-a-box solutions and have been slow to embrace AI/ML. These new-age solutions are better at detecting issues and have improved efficiency.
Fluid has successfully executed projects across Asia and the Americas. The team is now focusing on scaling the business in the USA given the water scarcity issues on the West Coast.
Why we invested?
- Need of the hour: Fluid Analytics’ tools help in accurate inspection, predictive maintenance, and data-driven planning for wastewater infrastructure management.
- Large market: They operate in a large market with regulatory tailwinds (~1.3 billion feet inspected each year in the USA), and strong drivers for adoption (legacy stack, manual annotation, resource constraints).
- Strong data moat: Fluid’s model is trained on sewage pipeline inspection footage from around the world — enabling high quality annotation outputs regardless of the quality of the camera feed and type of pipeline defects/ breakages.
- Founder fit: Asim Bhalerao and Nidhi Jain left their jobs in the Valley to develop robots that can map sewer networks in Pune, expanding the operation to multiple cities across India and finally developing a world leading AI/ML solution focused on developed markets, with demonstrated results. Their passion for, and expertise in the subject matter is unquestionable.
- Potential for product extensions: Develop workflows for users both up and down the value chain. We only foresee an increase in the use cases for AI/ML in sewage planning, monitoring and rehab.
We are excited for what lies ahead for Fluid Analytics as it accelerates its US GTM.
*Authored by Dhruvin Mehta
