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Kando: Improving Wastewater Quality Before It Reaches the Treatment Plant
W
astewater is not just waste—it is a product that will show up downstream, whether it is recycled and immediately reused for irrigation or consumption or it is discharged into a river or ocean, eventually ending up in our taps again. Treating wastewater and discharging it as high-quality, nonpolluted water is important, but it is also difficult. Kando is an Israeli company with an innovative approach to improving wastewater quality. Its software creates a real-time model of the quality of wastewater within a utility’s collection system and can identify and trace pollution events back to their sources. By working to improve the quality of the wastewater they collect, utilities can ease the burden on their wastewater treatment plants and produce higher-quality purified wastewater. In this interview, Gili Elkin, Kando’s chief growth officer, and Ari Goldfarb, its chief executive officer (CEO), tell Municipal Water Leader about how Kando’s product works and how it is helping cities around the world improve the quality of their treatment processes.
The user interface of Kando’s solution.
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.
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Ari Goldfarb: My background is environmental engineering, and I focus on technology and water. I’ve worked as a process engineer in a treatment plant and as a consultant and working engineer for almost 10 years. In 2012, I and one other partner founded Kando. Today, I am its CEO. Our vision is to create a better and healthier environment. It is a huge vision that one company cannot achieve alone. Our partnership with ICI Fund has become a model that has been integrated into all aspects of our business: We create partnerships with clients and other stakeholders in order to reach our goals. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about Kando as a company. Ari Goldfarb: The company was founded in 2012 to meet a gap in the market. There are a lot of technologies and solutions in the wastewater sector that focus on downstream water treatment plants—how to create better treatment methods, how to optimize the treatment, and how to improve the effluent. However, it was clear to me from my time in the wastewater sector, working with both industries and municipalities, that reducing a problem at its source is actually the best solution. It is natural for an urban utility to focus on improving how its wastewater treatment facility treats pollution, but if a utility can understand its wastewater collection system and control the upstream sources of pollution in real time, it can treat its wastewater even more successfully. Our idea was to create a technology that would allow users to see the quality of the wastewater in their collection systems in real time and control the sources of that wastewater. In Israel, utilities are particularly open to new ideas, so we brought this idea to them and explained that we could collect data from their collection systems and, for the first time, make those systems transparent to them. We approached utilities while our idea was still rather immature, and because they immediately saw the value of our vision, they didn’t look at us solely as vendors, but as partners, and actually helped us build our solution. Once we had built it, we found that there was a huge need for it, and after 3–4 years, we were working with many of the cities in Israel. We then moved into the Australian, European, and U.S. markets. In Europe, we work in cities like Athens; Berlin; Paris; and a number of cities in northern Italy, including Bologna and Milan. We now have
PHOTOS COURTESY OF KANDO.
Gili Elkin: I’m the founder and general partner of the Israel-Colorado Innovation (ICI) Fund. ICI Fund invests in promising Israeli companies in the water, wastewater, and agriculture industries, among others, and supports their scale-up in the United States through one of its partners, Innosphere Ventures. ICI Fund invested in Kando, and once it invests in a company it becomes a partner of that company. As such, I act as a member of Kando’s board of directors as well as Kando’s chief growth officer. I believe
that great goals can only be reached through strong partnerships, and we have built a strong partnership with Kando. We have a common goal that is greater than all of us, and we will do whatever it takes, together, to reach it.
