What happens when professionals who have been doing a job for decades retire? What does that mean for their organization? In most jobs, their colleagues can pretty much carry on as before. If a water operator retires without a suitable replacement in place, the optimal performance of the system they operated walks out of the […]
Insights
World Water Day: Celebrating What’s Possible
March 22, 2017 — On this World Water Day, we at Imagine H2O have reason to be optimistic. Every day we witness the ingenuity, perseverance, and technical prowess of entrepreneurs as they unlock promising, new solutions to a water-scarce future. With a front-row seat to water innovation, Imagine H2O is taking today to highlight progress, success and global impact.
World Water Day is also certainly an opportunity to raise awareness and reflect on the formidable challenges ahead. We should use today to mobilize civic engagement about water conservation and the plight of those without access to clean drinking water. We should encourage collaborative partnerships between government and business that help strengthen the resilience of our communities in the face of climate change. However, the urgency for action is constant — not just on World Water Day. It is an existential struggle as much today as it is every other day of the year.
Since 2009, Imagine H2O’s portfolio companies have overcome obstacles to build their businesses and drive adoption by customers in agricultural, industrial, and municipal markets. These companies have deployed solutions to urgent problems that radically improve the quality of water accounting and management globally.
Just this year, Ignitia provided weather analytics to 100,000 smallholder farmers in West Africa. Apana helped 80+ large retailers across North America reduce water usage by 20 percent. Ayyeka installed remote infrastructure monitoring tools in over a dozen countries, laying the groundwork for water-smart cities. ANDalyze tested lead and other contaminants in school districts across the United States.
These endeavors are part of Imagine H2O’s multiyear water data initiative, which harnesses better decision making to monitor and manage our water resources more effectively. It’s built on the premise that water data innovation helps farmers do more with less, informs infrastructure upgrades to reduce waste and improve access to underserved communities, and provides real-time monitoring of water quality.
Imagine H2O remains committed to dismantling the barriers to water innovation. And today, rather than highlight the challenges ahead — of which there are many — we want to celebrate the efforts of the entrepreneurs who are developing, launching, and scaling groundbreaking water technologies in markets the world over. We want to recognize the more than 700 people who have applied to Imagine H2O’s program as well as the 80 companies that have been supported through our accelerator.
Most of all, we want to highlight the 12 promising water data startups selected to participate in our 2017 accelerator as they give us hope that the future for water resource management is brighter than ever before.
Learn about Imagine H2O’s 2017 portfolio companies here.
