Aquagenuity’s Water Quality Data Platform Is Looking to Go Global

What started as a journey to evaluate and track local water quality in the U.S. has taken a global turn for Aquagenuity, the Atlanta tech platform now riding a wave of international interest. 

After lead was discovered in the water in Flint, Mich., in 2016, Ms. Avant saw a need to empower communities to understand what’s in the water they depend on for survival.

Collecting data from the Environmental Protection Agency, the CDC and other sources, the Harvard-educated data scientist uncovered a shocking truth: More than 3,000 other American communities suffered from lead levels as high or higher than Flint’s.

“I remember feeling personally upset and really disturbed, like how could this be happening to American citizens? I mean, don’t we have the best water in the world?” she wondered aloud in a 2018 TEDx talk. 

Beyond that, she found a fragmented, opaque data landscape, with wide variance in quality throughout different water districts, even in the same city. With so little transparency, she saw few incentives for utilities to change. Arming citizens with data would give them grounds for demanding improvements.

Ms. Avant created the aquascore, a metric to track water quality down to the zip code, using crowdsourced data recovered from kits she created with inspiration from at-home DNA tests. Soon, she realized that an algorithm could weigh factors like age of infrastructure, geography, historical land-use patterns and other variables to get a solid picture of a whole area’s water.

“It didn’t know when I was inventing the aquascore that was doing machine-learning,” Ms. Avant told Global Atlanta. 

The problem was that no one had collected, at scale, true foundational data that could underpin future models. 

Since jumping on the case, Aquagenuity has sent out more than 800,000 test kits and seen 25,000 schools adopt its Guardians of H20 STEM curriculum, both of which also feed the data engine even as they earn the company revenue. At the top of this stair-stepped approach, Ms. Avant foresees becoming a sort of BreezoMeter for water, she said, nodding to the Israeli platform whose air-quality API feeds online weather apps.

So far, with 82 percent of the U.S. water districts covered and rural areas being filled in, Ms. Avant is now finally turning her sights back to the. many inquiries she’s been fielding around the world. 

But the idea of going global with her water data platform is nothing new. Ms. Avant won the Atlanta Metro Export Challenge grant in 2021, but even before that, she had traveled with the City of Atlanta to the Smart City World Expo in Barcelona, catching a vision of how her connected platform could enable better decision-making for governments and more effective research from scholars. Even then, many countries were asking for a solution like Aquagenuity’s. 

Flowing Into Europe and Africa

But it wasn’t until the Consulate General of Switzerland brought a water tech delegation to Atlanta that she began to think about setting up offices abroad. Aquagenuity adopted Swiss-based EvoDrop as its recommended water filtration system, then applied for the Swiss edition of a Massachusetts incubator known as MassChallenge. 

Looking out at the majestic alps from the MassChallenge Switzerland office, she assumed the country’s water would rush with the purity of a mountain spring. The chemists at her Zurich-based filtration partners told her, however, that looks could be deceiving.

“Turns out, they are having the same type of water quality issues,” as the U.S. — from groundwater chemical contamination to lead leaching from aging pipes — as were many other European countries, she said. 

Ms. Avant has now set up an office in Lausanne, Switzerland, about a 35-minute drive from Geneva, the European base for the United Nations and the global headquarters of many multilateral institutions. It also puts the company a short train ride away from European capitals where Aquagenuity is building ties with governments and companies seeking access to the Aquagenuity product portfolio.

The company, which has nine people including full-time employees and contractors, is building on past recognition and backing from a Softbank investment, participation in Apple’s Impact Accelerator and give-backs like Aquagenuity’s foundation and Ms. Avant’s role on the board of the Atlanta-based Captain Planet Foundation.

Advancing across the Atlantic also puts the company closer to a huge opportunity: Africa, where a consortium of universities is looking to unleash their students on cross-continental data collection. For them, it’s a new educational opportunity and a civic-engagement project; for Aquagenuity, it’s another potential source of proprietary data. 

Deals brewing with Ghana and South Africa could bring together all of what brought Aquagenuity to this point: kits, curriculum, STEM training and filtration units, and they come as Ms. Avant is proving ready to flow like water across borders. 

“We’re now at the point where we can hit the ground running again.”