Waterson

Waterson (legal entity Waterson Technologies OÜ) develops real-time, automated water quality monitoring and early warning software focused on the biological quality of drinking water. Rather than relying on grab sampling and laboratory culturing — which the company states costs more than EUR 15 per sample and takes more than 16 hours for results — Waterson ingests minute-by-minute readings from off-the-shelf physicochemical sensors and applies machine learning to estimate the probability of a biological contamination event. Measured parameters include temperature, pH, turbidity, electrical conductivity and reduction-oxidation (redox) potential.

The product comprises three components: an AI algorithm layer, a water quality database of labelled data points used to train the algorithms, and a user interface presenting real-time analytics. Detected contamination events are reported in the interface and a warning is sent to the system operator. The software is offered with cloud-based and on-premise deployment options, supports SCADA integration, and is designed to be compatible with sensors from multiple manufacturers. The company states its algorithms can detect intrusion-caused contamination events down to 1% contaminant proportion in water, with accuracy up to 100% depending on contamination source and up to 99% on average; work on detecting biostability-related water quality deterioration was described as in progress.

Waterson's stated roadmap extends the early warning approach to long-term water quality trend detection and to traditional and emerging physical-chemical contaminants, and to water types beyond drinking water, including reused water in circular economy applications.

Founding story

Founded by Latvian entrepreneur Dāvids Štēbelis, with a research and development team drawn from water engineering, data science and IT backgrounds, including drinking water researchers and machine learning specialists.

Business model

Waterson licenses its monitoring software to end users operating existing physicochemical sensor infrastructure, stating a price point of one EUR cent per measurement, with cloud-hosted or on-premise deployment for each client.

Software licensing charged on a per-measurement basis (stated at EUR 0.01 per measurement), with the software layered on top of the customer's existing sensors rather than proprietary hardware.

Traction

By 28 November 2021 the company marked 100 working days of operation of the Waterson system, which incorporated online sensors covering 11 water quality measures and had collected 1,584,000 data points. A first public case study simulated raw wastewater intrusion by adding 1-3% contaminant to a pilot-scale drinking water supply system fed by a municipal network. The company was selected for the first Stockholm Techstars Accelerator class and reported preparing for a demo day and a seed round.

Latest developments

In April 2023, Buildit invested EUR 50K in the company as part of a EUR 100K deployment across two Baltic startups. Company news items also reference support for process digitalisation and a search for Horizon Europe project partners.