Technology has come a long way surpassing the traditional methods the councils and governments had a tough time dealing, with stupendous increase in population growth over the last few decades.
Australia, like any other country has its own set of problems to deal with water management. Thanks to the investors for having put their 2 cents on the what’s the need of hour.
VAPAR, is a Sydney start-up has developed a new cloud platform technology that will save local council engineers a lot of time and money.
The story behind the rise:
The company was founded by 2 female engineers Amanda Siqueira and Michelle Aguilar. While the former is a civil engineer and the latter one is a Mechatronics engineer.
VAPAR is transforming the way Australian councils maintain their storm water and sewerage assets.
The Funding:
Amanda and Michelle have received $25,000 Minimum Viable Product grant from Jobs for NSW to develop platform technology using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning that will automate reviews of pipeline CCTV footage.
Ms Siqueira in an interview said, “This grant helped us develop our platform and expand our technology to water utility customers, including Northern Beaches Council, our partners in developing our prototype.”
She later recollected about her internship by saying, “As an intern, I spent eight hours a day watching this footage just looking for faults, a time consuming and fatiguing process. Michelle and I thought up a better way of reviewing the footage that used Michelle’s background in enterprise automation and machine learning.
On building VAPAR prototype:
Having built the VAPAR prototype, Michelle said, the technology will allow the local councils to upload the pipe CCTV footages directly to the cloud platform for automatic analysis.
Both, Amanda and Michelle feel proud to have cut down the two-day process to two minutes, thus reducing the costs by 30 percent and allowing on-site repair work to be carried away without any further delay.
“With over 200,000 kilometres of gravity pipelines in Australia alone and $450 million spent each year maintaining sewerage networks, early detection and repair of faults in pipelines avoids the expensive process of digging up pipes once they are broken,” said Aguilar.
Future possibilities:
VAPAR has also been selected for a 12-month incubator program run by Fusion Labs supported by NSW government. A program that will develop business opportunities for Vapar in India.
“Our technology has huge potential not only in Australia but globally. In India we will be talking with IT providers and government asset managers to learn as much as we can to develop business strategies for that market,” Ms Siqueira said.
From what Siqueira has said, it will be interesting to see how VAPAR will help India in solving water management issues.
