THE INNOVATORS
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KETOS: Delivering Intelligence and Analytics for the Water Industry
The KETOS Wave device.
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ETOS is an award-winning water intelligence and analytics company that aims to empower municipal, industrial, and agricultural water users by providing them the insight necessary to make data-driven decisions in their daily operations. It charges customers a flat service fee to install and maintain a fully integrated proprietary hardware and software stack that provides real-time intelligence related to the quality and quantity of water that is making its way through their systems at various critical points. In this interview, KETOS Founder and CEO Meena Sankaran tells Municipal Water Leader about the company’s technology and how it solves long-standing water industry pain points. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
34 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020
Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your company, KETOS. Meena Sankaran: I founded KETOS in 2015. My thesis always has been that you only start a company when you know you’re solving a clear pain point and are adding value for customers. KETOS is a water intelligence company that enables operators to make data-driven decisions in their daily operations. Our target customers are industrial, municipal, municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTO COURTESY OF KETOS.
Meena Sankaran: I grew up in India and experienced what a good 70 percent of the world experiences when it comes to water: a limited supply of unsafe water. We only had a couple hours of water supply a day for the majority of the years I was growing up. There were also questions of affordability when it came to purchasing water filters. Under circumstances like that, you are more conscious about how you protect, preserve, and use such a precious resource.
I studied electronics and communications engineering in India and came to the United States to pursue my graduate degree in electrical engineering. The first 16 years of my career were heavily focused on datacenters, infrastructure, and networking. I felt that my efforts were geared toward improving the companies that I worked for, but I never felt that I was leveraging technology toward an application with a broader social importance or addressing a dire need. That desire for a mission-driven culture is at the core of why the seed of KETOS was planted and why solving an important problem, no matter how hard the challenge, was something I didn’t hesitate to embark on.
