Role of Academia In Building Startup Ecosystem (Justice Basheer Ahmed sayeed college)

According to NITI Aayog’s 2018 Composite Water Management Index report, public water supply in India will meet only half the projected demand by 2030, resulting in extreme water scarcity for millions. With 54 percent of India’s total area facing high water stress, urgent measures need to be taken to preserve and manage existing water resources across cities if we are to avoid a crisis like Cape Town’s Day Zero.

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Water scarcity in India is a looming issue. WEGoT aqua was innovated with an aim to reduce the water consumption by bringing about a much need behavioral change in the way people use water. In April 2015, 4 engineers (Vijay, Mohideen, Abilash, Sundeep) with absolutely different yet complementary skill sets founded WEGoT. In a country like India where almost all big cities are water starved, there is still no accountability for a consumer on his water usage. Growing up in Chennai and being witness to acute water shortages, the founders wanted to contribute and help the city solve its water shortage. Having understood the promise of IoT, the group ventured to develop a sensor-based IoT device and a software platform that provided an end-to-end water management solution. WEGoT aqua enables real time, data driven & automated decision making to reduce the water demand & increase the efficiency of water infrastructure in buildings. WEGoT aqua tracks the usage at all consumption points & generates bills as per water usage. The sensor also detects & notifies leakages, broken pipes, abnormal usage in real time via mobile app and web dashboards. Once notified, the user can shut the leaks remotely, thus saving water from getting wasted in leakages.

WEGoT aqua, an internet-of-things (IoT) water management digital platform, captures and shares real-time data on daily water usage patterns with clients, incentivizing them to save water over time. These water meters are a low cost, high precision, data driven water management solution that solves impending water crisis by reducing water consumption by up to 50%. While coming up with an innovative solution to tackle the water crisis was step one, we have also innovated on the business model to make it easily accessible to everyone by giving the product for free and charging only a monthly subscription fee. This dramatically reduces the upfront Capex cost to be incurred and leads to increased adoption. Since 2015, WEGoT has been instrumental in changing the way people treat water, and has helped save more than 3 billion+ liters of water and have successfully installed this solution across more than 30k+ homes, 40k million+ sq. ft of commercial spaces in India. WEGoT aqua, has brought about a much need behavioral change in the way people treat water and has resulted in reducing water consumption. WEGoT is one of the star startups incubated in Crescent Innovation and Incubation Council in the year 2019 and has strived to bring laurels with the help of CIIC. WEGoT has received many awards and recognitions of international and national standards.