Launch HN: NextDrop Technologies (YC S17) – Water Marketplace for Urban India

Hi HN,

I'm Anu, the Co-Founder and CEO of NextDrop Technologies (https://nextdrop.co). We are a water marketplace for urban India- we connect water buyers with suppliers.

There are 400M people living in Indian cities today, but only 200M of them get reliable access to the public utility water. The other half have to buy private water, often from water trucks!

Water buyers have a problem because surprisingly, people are paying more for their water than for electricity. My friend who lives on the outskirts of Bangalore, India (a major urban city) paid $50 for water and $40 for electricity last month. The price of water has tripled in the last decade and is on track to continue. What’s worse is that since water is getting so expensive and scarce, water trucks are starting to source water from dodgy sources like highly polluted surface water and really deep wells.

Water suppliers have a problem because they service demand as it comes in. They lose money due to bad scheduling and inefficient truck utilization. Many people think that all water suppliers are part of a “water mafia”, but the interesting trend we are noticing is that there are a lot of micro entrepreneurs popping up in the last few years who have their own water source, buy a truck, and start selling water.

Our marketplace fixes the problems for both water buyers and suppliers. By installing our smart metering devices into consumers water storage tanks and transmitting data to our platform, we can predict when someone is running low on water and schedule a delivery. We track the the water from the filling source to the delivery using GPS, giving users confidence they received clean water. Qualified water suppliers make more money and buyers get clean water and transparency into pricing.

We just launched this summer and are piloting with 3 apartment complexes with 11,000 people. We have devices installed and transmitting data to our platform. By next month, we should have enough water data to start automating water deliveries.

We'll be around to answer questions and discuss water management and are excited to hear your feedback and experience in this area!

Great stuff. Just curious do you have any background in environmental science?

Congrats for spotting this massive opportunity! This looks very promising. The sector is extremely disorganized and lack of competition is jacking up prices.

My question is: you're essentially serving a market whose need is not being met by the government.

Slowly but surely, the government will step in and solve the problem.

The problem is compounded by the fact that your target market - urban populations with smartphone access - will likely be served by governments before rural populations.

Happened in Jaipur. All my friends used to routinely get water tankers every week. Now they get municipal water.

Eventually, it will happen everywhere else too.

What then?

Hey- that's a great point, and I'm glad you brought it up. Our previous company actually sold water data to governments so we've been working quite closely with city municipal corporations. The problem is that urbanization is happening much faster than cities can keep up. Stats put it at 200M people added to cities in the next 10 years. What city municipalities are doing is actually hiring private companies to service the extra demand. It's still part of "the government" but India is trending towards more public-private partnerships. We actually WANT the government to start to sell water on this marketplace. We would have already laid down the IoT data collection infrastructure to help them keep their loss rates low and ensure the right people get good quality water (which is one of the biggest problems they have today). We see this as the next eventual step for governments not just in India, but in many emerging markets.

Congratulations on the launch! A lot of households also use water cans, and very often you cannot control the quality, are you planning to address this as well ?