Ramzi Bouzerda

Ramzi Bouzerda did not come to water from water. He spent close to two decades in banking IT in Switzerland, building software at Banque Pictet and then running group IT audit at BCV, the cantonal bank of Vaud, and on paper that was a comfortable place to stay. The turn came at 3 in the morning in his own kitchen, when he was trying to fill his son Naim's baby bottle to exactly 300 millilitres and kept overshooting, four times in a row, until he stopped and asked himself why the tap couldn't just help him do that. That small domestic annoyance is where the idea of an Internet of Water started, and in 2018 he left the bank, with four kids at home, to build it as Droople.

Ramzi Bouzerda's whole thesis sits on one observation that is easy to miss: we are completely blind to what happens to water after the main meter of a building. Utilities spend enormous effort sourcing water and pushing it through the grid up to that meter, and the entire industry's digital attention, all the smart-water and IoT money, stops right there at the network. Everything past it, the taps, the dishwashers, the boilers, the softeners and filtration cartridges that actually use the water, is a data desert. Droople's job is to light up that last mile with retrofit sensors and a small edge device he calls the iLink, which is sensor-agnostic and turns raw flow, temperature and quality readings into something a facility manager can act on.

Ramzi Bouzerda is quick to say the value is not in the sensor, it is in the correlation. Droople's platform groups water use into cycles, one cycle being a single use of water, then runs machine learning across every connected asset to spot what a single meter never could, like whether a hardness spike at the inlet is quietly killing the dishwasher downstream, or, in one of his favourite examples, whether children in a school actually washed their hands after using the toilet, scored live from the flow at the basin. The business model underneath is deliberately sticky: low-margin hardware that customers install themselves, and a recurring software subscription where the real value, and the real margin, lives.

Ramzi Bouzerda frames the prize in numbers that are genuinely hard to picture, so it helps to walk through them the way he does. He points to Xylem and McKinsey estimates of roughly 3 billion water main meters worldwide, about one per building, but then notes that a single modest three-flat building already hides something like 21 separate water endpoints behind that one meter, and a tower in New York hides far more. Stack that against the fact that by 2050 around 70% of us will live in cities, which he sums up as the world building one Manhattan every single month, and you get what he calls the biggest Internet of Things still flying under the radar. It is the same argument he brought to the (don't) Waste Water panel on exactly that question.

Ramzi Bouzerda's pull toward water, though, is older than any business case, and it traces back to Constantine, the old Algerian city of rock and rivers where he grew up. He tells the story of being six years old on the eleventh floor of a twelve-floor building where the grid pressure could not push water that high, so he, his mother and his grandmother carried tanks of water up the stairs by hand, the lift long broken. When you have lived a childhood where securing water is the first thing you think about each day, a career spent measuring how the rest of the world quietly wastes it starts to look less like a pivot and more like a homecoming.

“I try to fill my baby bottle of Naim at 3 AM in my kitchen, and I try to fill precisely 300 milliliters. I filled too much and then a bit less. It was too much again, and I made this iteration four times. And finally at 3 AM, I had a sparkle of light where I was telling myself: why can't my faucet tap help me fill that baby bottle in a better way?”

He is, in the end, a banker who got tired of the water nobody was watching, which is most of why Droople went looking for it past the meter, where the rest of the industry stops.