Victoria Edwards

Victoria Edwards did not come to water from engineering or utilities, she came to it from music. She trained as a classical pianist and read music at the University of Cambridge, where she majored in acoustic analysis, so the noises things make were, in her own words, already in her DNA. The leap to leaks happened almost by accident, when a friend's phone call about selling utilities a different product kept coming back to the one thing utilities actually wanted to talk about, which was leakage, and her co-founder, stuck in traffic on the M6 motorway, started turning his data-analytics background into a way of finding leaks by their sound. That chance conversation in 2014 became FIDO Tech.

Victoria Edwards built FIDO around a simple observation, which is that pipes make noises and leaks make noises, so if you want to find a leak you have to listen to the network, and the trouble is that good leak-detection hardware has always needed a human to sit and interpret the audio. FIDO's answer was to train an AI that takes the audio from any sensor (its own little device, an acoustic logger, a hydrophone, it does not care which) and tells you not just that there is a leak but, crucially, how big it is and exactly where, so a crew digs once for the largest losses instead of chasing six small ones. FIDO trained that model on a verified library of over 2.5 million files and now commits contractually to 92% accuracy, and to knock down the cost barrier it gives the sensor away for free and charges for the insight, the way you pay for the content and not the satellite box.

Victoria Edwards is attacking what the industry calls non-revenue water, which is the treated, pumped, paid-for water that utilities lose to leaks before it ever reaches a customer, and globally that is somewhere around a third of the supply. Her favourite way of framing how absurd that is has stuck with me: no other industry would build a factory, produce a hundred supercars and then set fire to forty of them on the forecourt, yet the water sector quietly does exactly that. So her hard opinion, and she is happy to call it a soapbox, is that you fix the water you have already produced before you go and build expensive new capacity, with desalination as the choice of last resort, not the first reflex.

Victoria Edwards earned FIDO's first break the hard way, by camping out at United Utilities' innovation lab in the north of England until she walked out with a contract, after eight iterations that turned three plastic balls in a cardboard box into the sensor-agnostic software the company sells today. FIDO went on to join the SKion Water group and raise a Series B, and in 2025 Victoria Edwards stepped back from the chief-executive seat to become FIDO's Founder Emeritus, turning her attention to a new venture, K622 Tech. You can hear the whole music-to-leaks story, and her ideas on how technology and honest data could finally fix the world's leaking networks, in her conversation on my water-tech podcast.

“I'm a musician and I majored in acoustic musical analysis, so leaks, acoustics, the noises they make are in my DNA.”

Victoria Edwards is, in short, the rare founder who can hold a Rachmaninov concerto and a leak-detection algorithm in the same head, which is most of why FIDO turned an acoustic hunch into a company utilities on four continents now trust to tell them where their water is going.