“Five years after our launch, our technology now saves more than nine billion gallons of water from being wasted through leaks every year, and that number is growing,” says Elly Perets, CEO of Asterra, formerly known as Utilis. “Now, we have rebranded our company to move beyond identifying underwater leaks to discovering all sorts of hazards, from potential landslides to underground drainage issues, so we can advise companies before disasters happen.”
Asterra is a company co-founded by a man who had to look up to the heavens in order to learn to see what is underground. For his master’s degree project in geophysics, Lauren Guy, the company’s CTO, was part of a team trying to identify underground water reserves on Mars and other planets. Guy realized that their theoretical work could have very practical applications on Earth, and he registered a patent for underground water leak detection technology.
“Because of Mars’ thick atmosphere, it was impossible to use visible light, so the idea was to use a synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) transmitted by satellites to get a remote sense of what there is on Mars,” Perets explains. “They used an L-Band that has long wavelengths that can penetrate the ground and give information about what is happening underground. This technology can’t be used to search for oil reservoirs kilometers underground, but it can penetrate several meters below the surface, up to 10 meters in ideal conditions.”
Later, when Guy left that project and went to work at a water company, the pieces came together, Perets says. “Innovation starts when you have an understanding of technology and then you realize that there is a problem in the market that it can solve,” Peretz said. “One of the water utility market’s biggest challenges is leakages in the pipes, where more than 15% and as much as 35% of all water can get lost in Western countries. We are talking about water that has been pumped, pushed, treated and delivered, and then gets lost just before it can be consumed. This has been a known problem in the industry for many years.”
“We developed a method to identify treated water accumulated in the ground,” Perets explains. “We don’t know exactly where the leak is in the pipe, but we can see the accumulation of water next to the pipe. We can also tell to a certain extent whether the water is treated or not, because there are a lot of reasons water can be present in a certain area. Our remote sensing algorithm can identify the water and sends the water utility company the location of a possible leak, and the company can send a team to follow up.”
This unique approach has raised many eyebrows even in Israel’s high-flying tech sector. In 2018, Utilis was selected as the most innovative company in the country by the FastCompany corporation. And in 2019, it was selected by the World Economic Forum as one of the eight Israeli companies with the greatest potential to design the next industrial revolution.
While other methods of locating such leaks included listening to ground vibrations with special headsets, or installing sensors in pipes, Utilis is the only company on the market using SAR technology to find leaks visually. And while the company has worked for years to gain the confidence of utilities for its unique approach, it recently gained the recognition of the American Water Works Association, the largest industry association dedicated to managing and treating water.
“Winning the AWWA’s inaugural Innovation Award this summer established our technology as a legitimate part of the toolbox that utilities need to know about,” Perets says. “It takes years for an industry to develop confidence in new technology, so getting recognized by the association that sets the standards is a huge development. Just this week, we signed a five-year agreement with one of the largest water utilities in the US because of this certification.”
Utilis now helps crews find an average of 3.5 leaks per day, saving 9.2 billion gallons of water and 21,800 MWH of energy per year. In total, the company now runs more than 430 projects in 57 countries, and has identified more than 36,000 leaks. That has helped reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 14,500 metric tons, equivalent to 12.5 millions pounds of coal burned.
While the company is growing quickly in the leak detection field, it is now expanding to other fields as well, adding pipeline monitoring and deficiency analysis as well as property assessment to its growing capabilities.
“We can tell a company where they need to put their efforts and budget before a disaster happens,” Perets says. “It costs about fifty times as much to react to an event than to prevent it, and that is beside the cost of human lives. In Scotland a few months ago, three people died because of a landslide that took place in a railroad next to Glasgow. We could have prevented that.”
Last month, the company rebranded itself as Asterra, a name derived from Astra, Latin for stars; Asterion, the Greek river deity, and Terra, on which we live.
“Utilis will always be the name of our company. But as we reach out to additional industries with new services and applications, the brand name Asterra will help us share a larger story beyond our continuing service to water utilities, and tell a wider audience how we are helping create a cleaner, safer, more sustainable planet,” the company said in a statement.
The company is now growing quickly, and it is looking to hire 12-15 new workers in the coming weeks to join its staff of 50. Asterra is based in Rosh Ha’ayin, with an office in San Diego and several workers in the UK and Amsterdam.
Asterra has raised just $9 million in funding to date, and is already revenue-generating, Perets notes. “We expect to do a reasonable-sized round to raise tens of millions of dollars in the coming year and a half,” he says. “That should allow us to reach a very large valuation without raising huge sums. The problem we are solving is well-known, and we are doing it in a way that is much larger and cheaper than anything else out there. The market is ready for us.”