I'm Anu, the Co-Founder and CEO of NextDrop Technologies (https://nextdrop.co). We are a water marketplace for urban India- we connect water buyers with suppliers.
There are 400M people living in Indian cities today, but only 200M of them get reliable access to the public utility water. The other half have to buy private water, often from water trucks!
Water buyers have a problem because surprisingly, people are paying more for their water than for electricity. My friend who lives on the outskirts of Bangalore, India (a major urban city) paid $50 for water and $40 for electricity last month. The price of water has tripled in the last decade and is on track to continue. What’s worse is that since water is getting so expensive and scarce, water trucks are starting to source water from dodgy sources like highly polluted surface water and really deep wells.
Water suppliers have a problem because they service demand as it comes in. They lose money due to bad scheduling and inefficient truck utilization. Many people think that all water suppliers are part of a “water mafia”, but the interesting trend we are noticing is that there are a lot of micro entrepreneurs popping up in the last few years who have their own water source, buy a truck, and start selling water.
Our marketplace fixes the problems for both water buyers and suppliers. By installing our smart metering devices into consumers water storage tanks and transmitting data to our platform, we can predict when someone is running low on water and schedule a delivery. We track the the water from the filling source to the delivery using GPS, giving users confidence they received clean water. Qualified water suppliers make more money and buyers get clean water and transparency into pricing.
We just launched this summer and are piloting with 3 apartment complexes with 11,000 people. We have devices installed and transmitting data to our platform. By next month, we should have enough water data to start automating water deliveries.
We'll be around to answer questions and discuss water management and are excited to hear your feedback and experience in this area!
by Andrey
Azimov