Founded in 2015, KETOS has worked tirelessly to transform the water industry with the goal of making water safer and sustainable for today and for future generations. KETOS has automated mission-critical testing and monitoring processes that were traditionally manual, slow, and expensive.
The U.S. water testing market represents an enormous market opportunity for KETOS, coming in at $80B in 2020. With strong tailwinds driving market demand for water quality and usage data, as well as improvements in efficiency and overall infrastructure, the U.S. market is projected to swell to $475B by 2030. This provides KETOS a huge market opportunity across three core verticals in agriculture, industrials, and municipalities. While KETOS’ technology and product provide performance and analytics that are advanced for the market, the digital water monitoring market specifically reached $8.7B in 2021 across 10 core markets. It matches the overall sector trends, and is projected to reach $20.2B in the same span.
* A Finite Resource: Freshwater makes up only 3% of the world’s water supply, and two-thirds of the world’s population may face severe water shortages as soon as 2025. 898T gallons of water are used annually by just 10 counties, 70% of which goes to agriculture, with industry and municipalities accounting for the other 20% and 10%, respectively. However, nearly 360B cubic meters of water is wasted each year from leaks within aging infrastructure and inefficiencies during applications. As the effects of climate change and a growing population continue to stress global water supplies, efficient and conscious usage will become a necessity.
* A Large & Growing Market: In 2020, the overall water monitoring market in the US was sized at $80B, driven by the two largest sectors in terms of usage, agriculture and industrials. This market is projected to explode up to $475B by 2030 as the importance of both quality and quantity continue to grow. For digital water monitoring specifically, 10 core markets spent $8.7B in 2021, with projected growth reaching more than $20B by 2030. KETOS has tracked 44 digital water solution providers across 40+ countries. Of those, fewer than 10% operate in non-municipal verticals (e.g. agriculture, commercial, industrials), which make up KETOS’ core customer segments.
* Large & Sticky Customers: KETOS has built a broad base of customers across the industrial, municipal and agricultural sectors, including an approval from the Department of Defense for deployment both domestically and internally across any base in the U.S. Air Force, Army, and Navy. Vertical farming offers another large subsector of growth, with 3 of the top 10 largest operations under contract with KETOS just 12 months after initial market introduction. With streamlined deployments and a value proposition that increases over the course of operations, KETOS’ Shield quickly becomes a necessity in these sectors that historically have lacked access to accurate and consistent data. Key signed customers include 3M, Pentair, Chesapeake Energy, Los Angeles Department of Water & Power, Texas Water Supply Co., Syngenta, Tyson Foods, and Bowery Farming.
* Strong Market Traction: With 48 signed enterprise customers and a strong nearterm customer pipeline across sectors, KETOS has conducted more than 170M water tests in the past 3.5 years, exceeding all water testing done nationwide in the last 18 years combined. Since 2021, the Company has doubled its customer base and revenue, and is deploying Shield units in Israel, Peru, Brazil, Canada, Singapore and New Zealand among other international opportunities.
* Experienced Team: KETOS boasts a management team with 175+ years of experience in relevant fields, and a Field Operations team with 100% veteran leadership. With a team of 50+ spread across 15 states and three countries with 26 languages, KETOS’ employees hail from notable companies like Cisco, Qualcomm, IBM, Intel, Oracle and General Electric.
KETOS has made significant strides in proving out their technology and use cases across the three core verticals in the water testing and monitoring markets. With an automated, accurate, and flexible platform, KETOS can provide significant value to customers with low upfront CapEx and just a 2 week ROI period. The automated and easy-to-use system also results in a 40% reduction in labor costs. In manufacturing settings, a single Shield system can result in savings on chemical water treatments of 15-20%, while that same system can result in 1M+ gallons of water saved in a single grow site in agriculture. These value adds have allowed KETOS to triple its customers and ARR in 2021. Within each of these market verticals, KETOS has achieved significant traction in several key areas:
- Oil & Gas
- Manufacturing
- Power Plants
- Private Municipal Water Providers
- Water Authorities
- Metropolitan City Utilities
- Meat Processing and Producers
- Consumer Goods Factories
- Steel and Fabricators
Customers
KETOS currently has signed 48 enterprise customers to standard 3-5 year contracts. KETOS has deployed 131 units cumulatively, including 25 added in Q1 2022. Through the end of the year, the Company estimates 230 total deployments with just signed customers. From 2021 through Q1 2022, KETOS recorded nearly $1M in new bookings and realized ~$500k in revenue, with improvements in gross margin driven by a continuously streamlined sales cycle and manufacturing efficiencies.
With just existing signed customers, KETOS has room for expansion of up to 508 Shield units at full deployment. In the near term pipeline, the Company projects to have an additional 202 Shield units installed in pilot deployments, with up to 577 units available at full expansion with these new customers. Over the next few years, KETOS projects 1000+ Shield units deployed by December, 2024, and $30M+ ARR by 2025. Some of KETOS’ signed and pilot customers are shown below.
Technology summary & value proposition
Technology
KETOS has developed a flexible technology platform for water quality, quantity and flow management by combining tenants of data science, robotics, water analysis, materials science, and cloud-based networks, that enables:
- autonomous testing (remote controlled)
- accurate testing (lab-level precision)
- affordable testing ($0 upfront CapEx)
- actionable analytics (insights w/ predictive intelligence)
The KETOS solution is a first-to-market robotics technology that enables enterprise customers to optimize water management with significant savings. The patented and proprietary hardware device, the Shield unit, encompasses more than 30 detection parameters in a single device, and utilizes robotics automation paired with proprietary materials science to provide both constant and scheduled testing data with no human component required. Once installed and sufficient data collected, the Shield can even begin providing advanced predictive analytics with machine learning, including alerts on potential upcoming maintenance and leaks.
Technological Advantage
Conventional water testing and monitoring methods are costly, antiquated and fail to provide the level of insight and awareness necessary for modern applications. 25% of operational expenditures for industrials, agriculture and cities are used for water testing and treatment. When water infrastructure breaks down, the negative impacts affect efficiency, operations, overall yield, compliance and treatment. In the U.S., 14% of water is wasted due to undetected leaks, and $1T is needed to upgrade these existing water systems. Examples of conventional testing and limitations include:
- Onsite/Offsite Labs: very expensive, 7 day wait time per test
- Portable Meters: labor intensive, one-time readings, no data storage/analytics
- Online Analyzers: single parameter, manual calibration
- Manual Reporting: no data integration/analytics, single readings, static
These legacy product offerings offer a host of complications to deployment and operations, for both vendors and customers. Traditional vendors have a long list of operational expenditures, from high hardware costs, expensive repairs, single-use materials, and disparate software platforms. For customers, maintaining and servicing traditional testing mechanisms is a time consuming process, and errors can result in system downtime and inaccurate results. KETOS provides a streamlined product offering that eases implementation and operations.
Business Model
KETOS’ fully integrated water monitoring solution provides significant advantages to legacy offerings. Shield units are deployed on a leased basis, with installation handled in-house by KETOS, resulting in 0 labor hours and $0 in hardware, integration, consumables, and replacement part costs for customers. The cost for one constituent data point is close to $0.005, compared to $70+ from legacy systems. These intense cost savings are combined with all the benefits of KETOS’ advanced platform, combining IoT sensor systems, built-in connectivity, secure data warehouse, smart and automated reporting and alerts, and predictive analysis.
KETOS operates on a Hardware-as-a-Service business model, typically signing 3-5 year contracts with enterprise customers for multiple Shield installations across locations. This provides stable and sticky revenue generation. The Company currently charges an operating fee of $1,800/month, which includes 24/7 remote monitoring, unlimited user licenses and testing frequency, across all 30+ parameters, with flexible integration with outbound APIs and no additional consumable costs. As the insights provided through KETOS’ analytics engine continue to evolve and grow with each additional data point, the Company plans to increase the monthly licensing fee to up to $2,700/month by 2024, providing significant room for revenue growth from just existing customers. This is in addition to deployment/installation fees, a one-time fee KETOS collects for each Shield unit in a contract.
KETOS boasts an outstanding team of 50+ employees in a global workforce with more than 175 years of cross-function and interdisciplinary experience. With professional backgrounds ranging from Cisco, Qualcomm, IBM, Oracle, Intel, and General Electric among others, KETOS’ leadership and field operations teams bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to a market ripe for disruption.
Meena Sankaran, Founder & CEO: Meena Sankaran is an accomplished technology executive, business leader, and evangelist driving global strategy and innovation for customer success through a variety of leadership roles over the last 16+ years prior to founding KETOS. She has a BE in Electronics Engineering from India and MS in Electrical ENGg from UTA, Texas. Her Leadership in KETOS’s engineering innovation, product & business strategy, team discipline, and strong culture are instrumental in the path to success. She won several awards, including being featured in Forbes as an ‘awe-inspiring women founder’ and a Builders + Innovators award winner from Goldman Sachs to name a few, and even represented SDG#6 at the United Nations.
Richard Long, CFO: Richard serves as Chief Financial Officer for Ketos and has over 25 years of financial leadership experience. Richard previously served as Head of Finance at Aperia Technologies, where he oversaw Finance, Legal, People Operations and IT and led the Company through its C Round of Financing. Before that, Richard was CFO at Sonim Technologies where he led the Company to $100M+ revenue and positioned the Company for its IPO. Richard holds an MBA from Stanford, a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Bristol (UK) and qualified as a Chartered Accountant with Ernst & Young in London.
Anand Grover, SVP - Supply Chain & Field Operations: Anand Grover has over 20 years of experience building and leading supply chain and customer operations organizations globally. Prior to joining KETOS, Anand led supply chain organizations at Fortune 500 and pre-IPO start-ups where he demonstrated a track record of success. Most recently, Anand was VP of Supply Chain and Supply Chain Transformation at Symantec and VP of Supply Chain and Service Operations at Blue Coat Systems and prior held leadership roles at Apple and Quantum along with other technology companies. Anand holds an MBA from Santa Clara University and a BS in Finance.
Greg Slater, SVP - Global Sales: Greg is a highly accomplished executive with 25+ years of international experience driving innovative sales, marketing and operations strategies that accelerate revenue, growth and market share across diverse industries. Greg is a seasoned business development leader, skilled in relationship development, client acquisition, and cross-functional team management. Prior to joining KETOS Greg led sales and marketing for global technology platform providers in artificial intelligence, contactor services management and equipment pooling. Greg was also co-founder and president of TrigPoint Solutions, a market-leading SaaS provider of intelligent workflow, mobility, data capture and analytics solutions for oil and gas companies and service providers which was acquired in 2017.
KETOS has the technology required to have a massive impact on human health and longevity in the U.S. and globally. With humanity’s population having doubled in the last 50 years, the demand for water has skyrocketed, leading to severe water shortages for nearly 2/3rds of the world’s population at least one month a year. By 2025, half of the world’s population could be living in areas facing consistent, long term water crises. Agriculture uses 70% of the world’s accessible freshwater, but nearly 60% is wasted due to leaky irrigation systems and inefficiencies within the system. In the U.S. alone, there are 1,165 community water systems that are in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act, impacting 44M Americans. In total, there are 21,035 Clean Water Act permittees that are in significant non-compliance with health standards. KETOS’ low cost solution allows for active and intelligent monitoring of parameters critical to human health and safety, and guidance for the $1T in water infrastructure improvements needed nationwide.
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