With the increasing of the world population, water shortage has become one of the major problems faced by many countries in the 21st century. According to publicly available information from the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, water use has been growing at twice the rate of population growth over the past century, and more and more areas are suffering from chronic water shortages. In addition, according to the report of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, by 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in countries or regions with absolute water shortages, and two-thirds of the people on earth may live under water shortages. Although there is no such thing as a global water shortage, water shortages affect the lives of about 40% of the world’s population.

Giiso Information, founded in 2013, is a leading technology provider in the field of “artificial intelligence + information” in China, with top technologies in big data mining, intelligent semantics, knowledge mapping and other fields. At the same time, its research and development products include information robot, editing robot, writing robot and other artificial intelligence products! With its strong technical strength, the company has received angel round investment at the beginning of its establishment, and received pre-A round investment of $5 million from GSR Venture Capital in August 2015.

Silicon Valley startup Pluto AI plans to use artificial intelligence to help solve water shortages of the century. Pluto AI, based in Palo Alto, was founded in 2016 by 500 Startups, a silicon Valley incubator. At the 19th demo day of 500 Startups in February, Pluto AI was selected by TechCrunch as one of the eight most promising Startups. Pluto AI was a star company from the start.

Pluto AI demo Day poster

Prateek Joshi

Prateek Joshi, the founder and CEO of Pluto AI, is from Gulburga, India. He lived and grew up in India before moving to the United States to study. “I know very well how important water quality is to the health of a community.” Joshi says.

Unlike the silicon Valley legend who dropped out of school to start his own business, Joshi conscientiously completed his education before officially launching Pluto AI. After completing his undergraduate studies in India in 2009, Joshi went to the University of Southern California to pursue a master’s degree in artificial intelligence, and received his master’s degree in 2011.

CEO Prateek Joshi

Despite having a clear understanding of water issues, Joshi, who graduated from THE University of Southern California, didn’t rush to start his own business. Instead, he went to work for a tech company in Silicon Valley. The companies he worked for include Nvidia and Microsoft Research, both of which are now leading in the field of ARTIFICIAL intelligence. Working at these tech companies helped him grow rapidly and accumulated valuable experience, which also gave Him the opportunity to apply artificial intelligence to water resources.

According to Joshi himself, during his work, his main research areas are deep learning, image recognition and data sequence analysis, in addition to the machine intelligence content analysis section, especially the intelligent description of input content.

Despite not dropping out of school, Prateek Joshi is by many measures a quintessence of Silicon Valley. He has published seven science books and given a TEDx talk, according to Lei Feng. In addition to the interest in artificial intelligence, there are many other aspects of interest, such as number theory, cryptography, quantum computing and so on.

Pluto AI is Joshi’s first startup project, but it’s not the first time he’s been involved with a startup. According to Joshi, in addition to the big tech companies in Silicon Valley, he has worked at some early-stage startups, so he knows how hard it is to start a business. He didn’t do it on a whim, he did it by being prepared and seeing the opportunity.

Pluto AI

“Artificial intelligence is coming into every aspect of people’s lives,” Joshi said. “In some cases, AI has already been used in advance, like autonomous driving and advertising recommendations. Pluto AI is targeting water resources.”

At present, in the face of the lack of water resources, “open source” and “throttling” are the two main ways to deal with it. In terms of open source, the cost of increasing the source of fresh water is quite huge. In addition to water search, water transportation and conservation are also problems. In the process of transportation and preservation of water resources, if there are no good measures to eliminate unnecessary waste, it will further increase the cost of water resources, and “eliminate waste” itself involves the problem of reducing expenditure.

“We are an intelligent water management analysis platform that aims to prevent water waste, monitor the health of water equipment, and reduce operating costs for water enterprises,” Pluto AI says. Pluto AI’s obvious focus on reducing water consumption is to minimize wasteful use of water and increase water efficiency per unit volume.

More specifically, Pluto AI collects data from water companies and uses its own ARTIFICIAL intelligence systems to help companies analyze where to modify and replace older equipment and improve workflows to maximize water use per unit volume.

With the Pluto AI platform, as data accumulates and machine learning progresses, Pluto AI can quickly detect data anomalies based on data provided by water companies and predict possible failures, thus minimizing the loss of water resources during failures.

According to Pluto AI, the failure of water enterprises can lead to the pollution of precious water resources on the one hand, and the waste of water resources in the region on the other hand. For example, water pipes burst, resulting in the loss of drinking water. In Pluto AI’s official blog, they wrote: “the average life span for the water supply pipeline is 47 years in the United States, now equipment aging to a significantly increased risk of water resources is wasted, and all these pipes to replace is extremely expensive and unrealistic, we can use the existing data, scientific planning with less cost and replace the corresponding pipe.”

150,000, Pluto AI reported the number of water supplies in the United States alone. For Prateek Joshi, Pluto AI’s target companies are not just water plants, but all kinds of water-related enterprises, such as power plants and beverage plants, that need a lot of water. “We use top-of-the-line ARTIFICIAL intelligence to implement our ideas, and some of the largest water and beverage companies in the world are among the pilot customers we work with,” Joshi said.

As an artificial intelligence (AI) powered water management analytics platform, Pluto AI’s solutions are stored in the cloud, which means that enterprise terminals do not need specialized equipment and hardware, just interfaces and networks to transfer data to Pluto AI’s platform. Pluto AI says this can significantly reduce the cost and challenges faced by companies and simplify the process of self-checking their water equipment, compared to some water solutions from other companies. Simply put, it saves time, money and water.

Giiso information, founded in 2013, is the first domestic high-tech enterprise focusing on the research and development of intelligent information processing technology and the development and operation of core software for writing robots. At the beginning of its establishment, the company received angel round investment, and in August 2015, GSR Venture Capital received $5 million pre-A round of investment.

Pluto AI official website screenshot

Pluto AI has already worked with water companies, including two of the top 10 U.S. water companies, on several testing projects.

It is worth noting that the company has not yet announced detailed pricing, but the company said: “As a data-based SaaS platform, services are determined by data size and frequency, so prices are based on the volume of data.”

Pluto AI just received a $2.1 million seed round of financing in early April. Investors include 500 Startups, Refactor Capital, Fall Line Capital, Unshackled Ventures, and NerdWallet co-founder Jacob Gibson.