Ketos raises $18 million in Series B funding for its water quality and distribution monitoring software

Ketos, a San Francisco-based IoT startup and a provider of hardware and software analytics solutions and real-time data for usage and flow across water systems, today announced it has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round led by Motley Fool Ventures with participation from Citi and Illuminated Funds Group as new investors.

The round, which brings the company’s total funding to $30 million since launch in 2015, includes existing investors: Rethink Impact, Ajax Strategies, Better Ventures, Plum Alley Investments, and Broadway Angels. Ketos will use the funding to scale and further advance its patented, proprietary solution which includes a robust cloud-based software platform and intelligent hardware, which is assembled and manufactured in the U.S.

Founded in 2015 by Meena Sankaran, Ketos provides hardware and software analytics solutions and real-time data for usage and flow across water systems and monitors water health parameters such as pH, dissolved solids, hardness, turbidity, and salinity. Ketos also offers a comprehensive offering of Industrial-grade patented hardware, IoT communication framework, a robust software platform to address global water management issues, mission-critical insights, and services for empowering operators across all industries

With the need for increased Industry automation and data-driven decision-making across water-intensive sectors, KETOS offers a fully integrated, EPA-compliant solution with intelligent hardware, stable connectivity infrastructure, an interactive software platform, and actionable data. The holistic solution helps solve critical water efficiency and quality challenges with real-time monitoring, delivering predictive intelligence, and mission-critical insights, which is further amplified with the pandemic.

“Creating one of the largest centralized data lakes of water quality insights — with information on heavy-metal toxins, coupled with location-based mapping and potential contamination sources — the potential for what machine learning and artificial intelligence can achieve is limitless,” said Meena Sankaran, Ketos Founder, and CEO. “KETOS can potentially prevent a disease outbreak or provide citizens visibility on a global scale, which could impact their own public health.”

The KETOS machine learning models offer actionable insights by leveraging a comprehensive dataset collected in real-time with precision, sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy for parameters like selenium, arsenic, chromium, manganese, iron, nitrates, and more. This can be used for transforming operations to predict issues related to chemical treatment, public health, process control, food processing, effluent discharge compliance, and more. Interoperability is a key aspect in the digital adoption of a customer and the flexibility offered by the Ketos smart water management platform crucially empowers users to protect their investments and have their data managed based on their preferences.

“KETOS is truly disrupting the water intelligence industry with the data it captures autonomously (remotely controlled) and makes available to its customers for forecasting water management issues, which is even more top of mind as the world battles COVID,” said Ollen Douglass, Managing Director of Motley Fool Ventures. “For the first time, it is possible to use predictive modeling and much needed mission-critical insights with $0 capital infrastructure investments, to build, take action and make informed decisions about a water network.”