Meena Sankaran

Meena Sankaran did not come to water from water. She spent her early career in enterprise technology, in the data-center and infrastructure world, learning how you build large systems that blend hardware and software at scale, with security and IoT (the internet of connected devices) baked in, and she decided to point all of that at drinking water, which she calls the last frontier of digitization. She holds a Master's in electrical engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington and an electronics-engineering degree from the University of Mumbai, and she founded KETOS in 2015.

Meena Sankaran's core complaint about the water sector is that it is data-rich, information-poor, running on a legacy mindset where you buy a box, see the vendor again in a few years, and never really know what is in the water in between. Her favourite way of putting the stakes is that we measure our steps and our heartbeat all day, yet 99% of people have no clue to the quality of water they drink. The gap she went after is heavy metals, the kind of contamination behind Flint, Michigan, because the sensors to read those continuously simply did not exist.

Meena Sankaran's answer was to build the hardware herself rather than wait for it. As she puts it, if that existed she would have just done the software, but it did not, so KETOS assembled a cross-disciplinary team of chemists, materials scientists, physicists, robotics engineers and cloud architects to build a 100% remote-controlled robot that continuously tests around 26 water-quality parameters and is run from a phone. KETOS sells the whole thing as water-quality data as a service on a flat fee, taking on the risk and the liability so a utility does not have to buy, calibrate and babysit the instrument itself. It is a good example of the kind of digital water shift the sector has been slow to make.

Meena Sankaran knows hardware scares investors, who, in her words, run away from it if they can because a software startup is easier to fund and measure, but she is convinced that hardware is transformational and that the useful intelligence only comes once you have built the thing that does the sensing. The harder battle has been the industry's patience. Large legacy water players told her flatly that they do not take a company seriously before it has crossed the five-year mark, and others quoted her seven years, or ten, before they would trust it to survive.

Meena Sankaran turned down the standard founder script, the one where you build a startup, get rich, and only then go do good. Her reasoning is blunt about the odds, since roughly one in a thousand startups succeed, so why wait to do good for a stretch of time with no guaranteed outcome at the end of it. She would rather the doing-good be the work itself. It is the same instinct that took KETOS into a Smart Village project across 25 Indian villages that were getting water once every four days, and it is why she frames water as a distribution problem, not an availability one. The ~$45 million KETOS has raised is the audited figure from Leviathan, my own water-sector database, and you can see how I source those numbers on the methodology page.

“when you are successful in creating value, the money will come. And if you put the focus on value creation and problem solving, the other parts fall in place.”

Meena Sankaran is, in short, the enterprise-tech architect who decided water deserved the same continuous, software-grade intelligence as a data center, and then built the missing sensor to make that possible.