The water sector is at the heart of two of humanity’s greatest challenges. The first is our growing freshwater demand, driven by a swelling population coupled with the need to uplift those who still do not have access to safe and reliable services. The second is the need to rapidly reduce the emissions associated with delivering these services to fight climate change. Currently, these two are at tension. This doesn’t have to be the case. Pani’s goal is to accelerate the world’s transition toward a sustainable water supply by developing and implementings technologies that enable facilities to optimise their processes.
Real-time measurements, bolstered by AI-drive advice, empower facilities owners and operators to make quick and smart decisions with confidence. This drives down operating costs, reduces risk, eliminates water loses and ultimately avoids greenhouse gas emissions. In doing so, we are defining a new category of treatment: the Water Zero Facility.
Devesh Bharadwaj, President & CEO, Pani Energy – Victoria
Devesh Bharadwaj is an entrepreneur, engineer, and CEO of Pani, an award-winning water technology company. Committed to taking action to address climate change by accelerating humanity’s transition to sustainable water, Devesh founded Pani in 2017 out of university research, and has led Pani’s growth from the lab, to bootstrapping in a garage, to a multi-million-dollar company with over $10M raised to accelerate development and deployments.
As a high school student in New Delhi, Devesh Bharadwaj learned a staggering statistic about the projected gap in fresh water supply and demand—that 60% of humanity’s needs for clean water go unmet. There is not enough. Struck by the immensity of the problem, Devesh devoted his university research to engineering a solution. With more research, the root problem became clear—water treatment plants simply didn’t have access to the underlying data-driven digital technologies they needed. Instead, a lack of digitization has contributed to widespread firefighting against daily increasing risks, costs, water supply shortages, and greenhouse gas emissions. So how do we solve the biggest challenge of our time? Digital transformation. Only by leveraging the insights of artificial intelligence can we revitalize existing water treatment infrastructure to become more efficient and sustainable. With Pani, water treatment facilities of any shape and size can begin their digitization journey and contribute to a more sustainable water future.
Pani’s vision is to accelerate humanity’s transition to sustainable water and reduce annual carbon emissions by 510 megatons, starting in 2032. Pani offers a cloud-based, machine-learning software platform to optimise the efficiency of industrial and municipal wastewater treatment and desalination plants. The platform integrates with a plant’s existing hardware, control, and/or data systems to ingest and aggregate data from the entire operation. Pani’s product then assists the operations team with visualizing, analysing, and interpreting their data to optimize performance, avoid process upsets, extend equipment lifespans, and minimize costs. When operations teams use Pani’s product, they save downtime and resources, ensure compliance and reduce their environmental impact. Currently deployed in plants in North America, Asia, and the Middle East, Pani is expanding its customer base across the globe and working with some of the largest water treatment players in the sector.
Some recent awards and recognition for Pani’s technology and Devesh’s leadership include: Global Cleantech 100 list for 2022; Best Go To Market Strategy at BlueTech Forum 2022, and Emerging Leader in Canada’s Clean50 list for 2023.