Waterbox, Autonomous urban water Utilities
- Pre-Seed
Waterbox is a 2G IoT, AI managed autonomous Water Meter, it acquired, classifies, maps and compares water usage demand and maintain water utility services, extending services coverage and oversight.
it significantly reduces the enormous Costs of providing water utility services; AI handles data acquired, classifies, maps and compares water usage demand, assigns billing profiles, uses machine learning to maintain the service, autonomously analyzing sensor data a self-recharging mechanism ,pressure, tamper and other sensors prevent water fraud and report potential problems such as leaks in the network without human supervision and its cost;
Designed to meet demands for House hold, Small and Medium Business Utilities it enables new pricing models and payment (SMS,Mobile, POS) to be introduced, such as PAYG, prepaid, and other for low income or remote rural areas.
Bringing transparency, control and flexibility of consumption to utility services increased increased 15% of reliability of utility services and
Better water management and monitoring results in a better usage of the resource service preventing scarcity and misuse, providing transparency and efficiency in the utility service, deployment will be done by user adoption (purchase) of the devices driven by reduced water fees incentives via reduction on first water usage data.
reduced fee for low than average consumption measurements - Reduction in resource miss usage
implementation of PAYG and prepaid plans via SMS and mobile payments - extended water coverage
logging website visits to water usage map provided to the user and dispatch of SMS threshold warning alerts. - increased awerness in resource usage
- Upper middle income economies (between $3976 and $12275 GNI)
- Lower middle income economies (between $1006 and $3975 GNI)
- Urban
- Rural
- Suburban
- Europe and Central Asia
- Latin America and the Caribbean
- US and Canada
- Consumer-facing software (mobile applications, cloud services)
- Digital systems (machine learning, control systems, big data)
- Electrical engineering
- Mechanical engineering and hardware
- Robotics
it uses energy harvesting by means of providing its own recharging energy from the water flow it measures
it uses AI to require minimum human supervision eliminating the high cost of monitoring centers and personnel
it uses Machine Learning to minimize the cost of system maintenance
it engages user awareness via notifications and alarms to directly involve end users in conservation and better usage ACTIONS.
It enhances conservation actions by involving people in acknowledging their water usage, and providing them with tools to better manage (via thresholds) their resources, it extends the coverage of services by giving communities a simple way to implement an billing platform with out the need of information systems knowledge, right out the box enabling the implementation of water utility services that can be managed by communities right out of the box making such en devours self sustained from day one.
it will be deployed via the site, providing full implementation kits (water meters) and by making the product opensource, enabling communities to build their own versions of the hardware water meter and uploading the firmware and providing a simple API to connect thir DIY device to the billing platform and registering users by simply enrolling their mobile phone numbers and the IMEI of the waterbox that provides the service.
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- For-Profit
- Guatemala
so far we have been granted angel investor seed funds and a funds from a nonrefundable price from a local NGO; upon completionof first pilot program we plan on seeking funding from investors to expand the services in urban areas of Guatemala (private gated house compounds) about 1Million house holds in Guatemala and from there make the project self sufficient to expand to rural areas, and seeking VC funds for international growth (about 18 month plan)
the actual make of the device, as any other IoT project the actual front cost of making the devices is our major growth limit, as increasing numbers changes costs and time tables for delivery of the devices, making, shipping and delivering the devices is our biggest logistics challenge.
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https://flatbox.co/waterbox/
http://www.prensalibre.com/economia/economia/flatbox-tecnologia-a-favor-del-agua
http://www.innovationworldcup.com/2017/01/iot-innovators-of-the-year-2017/
- Financial Inclusion
- Water Treatment
- Water Sourcing
- Built Infrastructure
- Inspection & Monitoring
We want to become connected to other leaders and technology wizards that knowledge and understand the impact of water conservation and Water as a utility, we want to reach to others in different environments and cultures that face the same challenges in urban water conservation and consumption, to broad our data on water usage and its cycles.
we have not heard of some one doing automated PAYG for water services.
CTO