This company can help us safe the World! Why we invested in Fido Tech?

Impact investment — it sounds great, right? What about greenwashing? How many “impact” companies that can bring a real change and at the same time be a great, profitable business that is growing 10x annually?

Meet our recent investment — FIDO Tech Ltd.

When I was setting up the RKKVC, I have decided, that one of our core investment policy would be “to invest in companies that has no negative impact on environment or society”. In a way, we wanted to be more “green” but we were not focusing solely on such investments, since it is extremelly difficult to find a meaningfull companies that can bring significant return to our LPs as well as bring a real — global — change. We can not foget that a venture capital game is not just a fancy title, but a hard work and we, as a GPs, we need to be laser focused to provide large returns from our investments.

Fido.tech has a unique opportunity to become the largest and the best detection solution which identifies leaks, size of leaks as well as provide accurate location of the leak. In other words, this company can save us from losing water on a mass scale. Just think about it for a while — how enormous the market is, how this problem will arise in the upcoming years. Fido can be a trully our key to save the environment.

How bad the situation is?

We need to start from ciation of the Fido CEO — Victoria Edwards on the COP27 in Egipt, “Take water leakage. Worldwide it’s estimated that around 30% of all the water which is carbon-intensively produced is lost before it reaches the end user. This is partly because it’s undervalued. Finding and fixing leaks is hard and time-consuming in this context because around 90% of them never show above ground. Lots of places don’t even accurately measure their leakage losses.”

Water is a daily necessary resource for life, health, economic development and the ecosystem all over the world. We all agree, water is precious to everyone, its availability and quality are essential — especially in countries that are not rich in drinkable water sources. Climate change, droughts, water shortages and population growth are increasing the strain on existing water resources, thereby increasing the necessity to preserve and avoid water wastage through effective management and reduction of water losses.

It is unbelivable how significant amount of water is lost in the water supply system in the mordern cities. Water leakages have been a major problem for many regions around the world. For example, in England (a home country of Fido) some countries water loss due to water leakages in the supply network exceeds 40% of the water in the supply system — see figure below:

Imagine, Bulgaria in early 2000 was losing almost 50% of its water! And the Water firms in England and Wales lost in average more than 2,900 million litres of water every day in the period 2021–22, reports The Guardian. Imagine, that amounts to 1.06 trillion litres in one year, the equivalent of 426,875 Olympic swimming pools, yet this was reduced over 11% between 2017–2019.

Another example: Singapore

One of the best use-case on a large scale of the Fido solutions is Singapore. This country is considered to be one of the most water-stressed countries in the world. It is heavily dependent on rainfall due to the lack of natural water resources, and limited land is available for water storage facilities. By 2060, Singapore’s total water demand could almost double, with the non-domestic sector accounting for about 70%. Recently, the country has embarked on an integrated, effective and cost-efficient way to meet the nation’s water needs with investments in research and technology to treat, recycle and supply water. What is more interesting, one of the key national strategy is to “collect every drop of water”. Taking into consideration risks associated with water supply, they need to eliminate every possible leak in the country, whatever it takes. This is where Fido can help improve in significant way reduce any leakages, on a mass scale, without large investments.

So where are we going?

The United Kingdom Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has said that it has proposed targets on water companies to reduce water leakages and is proposing legally binding targets to reduce leaks by over 30% by 2037, while it will “continue to challenge those with the poorest records on leakage to maintain their networks and lower the levels of water needlessly lost”. Meanwhile, reducing leakage further will be more difficult for those utilities that have already made important progress.

This summer — 2022 — England experienced the driest July since 1935, and extreme temperatures have resulted in a record high water demand, up to 30–40% more than the normal levels at this time of year. Several companies have implemented temporary use bans (known as hosepipe bans) in some regions following the unprecedented weather conditions. Look at the chart below.

from nasa.com

This is a game changer — FIDO AI

FIDO is a global technology company using deep-learning to find the water leaks that matter. Its AI is the only technology which uploads any files from any (!) sensor device, analyses them instantly, ranks by size, to more than 99% accuracy. FIDO AI is the only data-as-a-service (DaaS) end-to-end leak detection solution which identifies leaks and the size of leaks to hit water losses hard. Do not get me wrong — in RKKVC we are not investing in hardware solution, but here, FIDO can use almost any device that can measure the noise, so it’s a hardware agnostic solution and that is why it’s fulfilled our strict requirements. Still, FIDO knows the struggle of obtaining hardware and software from two separate vendors, that is why, for most of its customers sweeps are delivered free of charge, as a part of the subscirption.

The companys cutting-edge AI was trained on verified leak data to deliver instant super-accurate results on any water network. So far, there is no technology and commercial-mass solution that is as accurate as FIDO.

How FIDO can sense the leak?

FIDO AI is the elegant patented algorithm at the heart of our leak detection solution. It is so uniquely attuned to the data trail left only by real leaks that nothing beats it for speed and accuracy. What is even more, FIDO can asses the size of the leak.

FIDO is AI in the true sense of the word. It was trained on verified leak data from one of the world’s most sophisticated water networks. It applies these learnings on any network to give results that are almost 99% accurate.

Artificial intelligence — real use case

What makes Fido AI extremally interesting for us is how it allows utilities with no current proactive or digitized capabilities to set up a complete systemwide, end-to-end smart leak detection program almost overnight. In other words, any water company can setup the Fido solution in a few hours — that will give them the full picture, where are the largest leaks.

New AI business models based on data as a service (DaaS) now include simple, low-skill, no-calibration, acoustic sensors that also act as accurate in-field correlators and ground microphones to pinpoint leaks, as well as repair validators for evidenced revenue assurance. This upends the need to invest heavily in new equipment before seeing returns.

But the real value of machine learning (ML) technology lies in its ability to constantly learn from actual field data to reduce false positives and provide new kinds of actionable insight. Here, we need to admit thatAI engineering that Neil Edwards and his team created is just mind-blowing.

Leak-sizing is a great example of this. Not only has AI delivered accurate leak/no leak results from any source on any material, but it has also been trained to listen for leak size using acoustic files. This previously unavailable insight lets city managers prioritize investigations on the leaks that matter.

Armed with a heatmap of leaks, next-generation acoustic technologies like this are really taking the leak detection industry to another level. Adoptive utilities have halved their overall leak run time just by concentrating on their large leaks. With the imminent addition of remote control and monitoring using the Internet of Things (IoT), managers will remove even more human input from the process, allowing skilled talent to be deployed to where it delivers most value.