Ari Goldfarb

Ari Goldfarb did not arrive at wastewater from a spreadsheet. Ari grew up a few hundred meters from the Mediterranean and, in his own telling, was surfing before he learned to walk and diving before he learned to run, and the thing that stayed with him was watching that same sea get more polluted year after year. So when he became an environmental engineer and then a process engineer running treatment plants more than twenty years ago, the problem he kept hitting was the one nobody had a handle on: the wastewater coming into a plant changes quality all the time, and an operator has almost no way to see those changes coming. That gap is the whole reason Kando exists.

Ari Goldfarb co-founded Kando in 2012 with Zohar Scheinin to close that gap, and the idea is simpler than it sounds once you notice the white space. Ari likes to point out that every other part of a city is now instrumented, the roads have cameras, the power grid is smart, even the drinking-water network is metered, but the underground sewer is a data desert, with almost nothing collected from it. Kando drops battery-powered data loggers and off-the-shelf sensors into manholes across the network, measures basic things like pH, electrical conductivity and temperature, sends it all to the cloud over the cellular network, and then translates those readings into something an operator can actually act on. As he puts it, a client opening the system doesn't see raw data, he sees where a pollution event is, what caused it, and what it will do to his treatment plant.

Ari Goldfarb frames the value of all this around a single shift in mindset, which is that most utilities treat the quality of the sewage arriving at their plant as a fact of life, and his pitch is that you can control it, once you can see it. Kando traces a spike back to its source, often a specific factory, and the company will even send that factory a direct SMS while the discharge is still happening, so the operator gets a text over the weekend dinner telling him he is dumping high pollution into the city's collection system. Ari is careful not to cast those polluters as cheats, because in his experience it is rarely deliberate: an industrial manager's attention is on his product, not on his wastewater, so most of the problem is simple inattention that a real-time alert fixes overnight. The measured effect is real, with the show's own write-up noting operators who used to catch one quality shift a month now seeing three or four a week.

Ari Goldfarb came on (don’t) Waste Water in 2020 with a timely version of that thesis, because COVID had just taught the world that the sewer is a public-health sensor. Kando ran wastewater surveillance that Israel's Ministry of Health went on to take nationwide, using a city's sewage to flag fresh outbreaks and even estimate how many sick people sat behind a given neighborhood, which makes sense once you accept Ari's line that everything that happens in a city ends up in the sewer system. He sees that as the beginning rather than the trick of the moment, because the same pipes that carry a pollution signal also carry a health signal, an activity signal, the raw material for understanding a city, and almost none of it had been read until now. By 2026 Kando has raised about $30 million, including a $10 million round in 2024 to push that platform into the US and Europe, the kind of money that follows a thesis once a pandemic has proven it.

Ari Goldfarb is worth listening to because the proof he reaches for is personal rather than promotional. The project he calls the most exciting of his career was in his own hometown, where Kando hunted down the source of the sewage overflows that were spilling into the Mediterranean and helped take them from more than ten a year down to zero, in the very stretch of sea he had surfed as a kid. That is the whole arc in one story: the operator who became the founder, building the tool that finally lets a city watch its own wastewater, and using it first to clean up the water he grew up in.

“Everything that happens in a city ends up in the sewer system.”

Ari Goldfarb is, in short, the treatment-plant operator who decided the sewer deserved the same instruments as the rest of the city, and built Kando to give it them. You can hear the full story in his (don’t) Waste Water episode below, or read how the wider digital craze is reshaping the water industry.