Invest Vancouver suggests water tech “provides an untapped economic opportunity for the Metro Vancouver region,” serving a multi-billion dollar global market.
IV’s latest report, “Water Tech: The Metro Vancouver Region’s Untapped Clean Tech Opportunity,” provides BC with an overview of the region’s opportunities and challenges in the sector.
Invest Vancouver identified 59 Metro Vancouver-based, export-oriented water tech firms. These firms are involved in technology innovation, research, design, or development. They average a dozen full-time employees.
The list of firms “reflects the twin influences of the region’s innovation ecosystem,” notes the report, including the regional hydrogen cluster and the region’s supporting role in the province’s resource extraction activities.
Salient names include Mangrove Lithium, which has major backers in Bill Bates and BMW, and entrepreneurship@UBC alumni Acuva Technologies, a 2021 BC Tech Awards finalist focused on providing access to affordable clean drinking water in as many countries as possible.
The report identified several companies in the “Digital Solutions” category of BC water tech. We highlight the startups below.
Aqua Intelligent Technology
Founded in 2018 by Reza Rezaei, AIT wants to help more people access clean water, especially in remote communities.
“Aqua Intelligent Technology helps small cities to access clean water via monitoring the water journey from source to tap, detecting contaminations in the water sources, catching operational problems in the water treatment utilities, and perhaps most importantly, helping local operators to address problems quickly and protect inhabitants from waterborne diseases,” the startup explains.
Aquatic Informatics
Aquatic Informatics provides software solutions that address critical water data management, analytics, and compliance challenges for the growing water industry.
“From raindrop to sewer discharge, our interconnected data management platforms drive the efficient management of water information to protect human health and reduce environmental impact,” the company states.
Brands include AQUARIUS analytics software for natural environments, WaterTrax compliance for municipalities, Linko software for management of industrial pretreatment, and Tokay for cross-connection control management.
Above Atlantis
This fledging startup is working to provide affordable and user-friendly access to flood modelling services to communities and businesses across Canada.
The project was originally part of the AquaHacking BC 2020 competition and remains in stealth today.
Infinitii (formerly Carl Data Solutions)
In October, Carl Data Solutions rebranded to infinitii ai, supporting a multi-product predictive analytics software portfolio focused on Machine Learning capabilities.
infinitii ai provides environmental monitoring to many of the largest water infrastructure utilities in the U.S. and Canada, and has evolved into an AI-driven predictive analytics for Smart City and Smart Industry infrastructure operations that rely on time-series data.
Launched in 2014, the company is not really a startup anymore as it is now public under the ticker symbol IAI—but with a smaller market cap and noble purpose, we let that detail slide.
BujiBui
Founded in 2016 by Ken Sheyka and Neehar Karnik, this Vancouver startup has designed a platform for projects that require the means to interpret and visualize expansive, complex, multi-dimensional and spatial data in real-time.
“BujiBui is a cloud-based platform that delivers lossless and detailed representations of very large 3D data to desktops, mobiles, and wearables in conventional mode, VR and AR,” the company says. “The design is browser-based, and 3D data format, device, and cloud agnostic.”
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