Hosts: Will Sarni & Tom Freyberg
Guest: Erin Rothman | Founder & CEO | StormSensor
Category: 🤖 Technology
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[6:54] “I was focused on industrial stormwater compliance at the beginning, because that was my background. But then once I started talking to cities, they said […] what they needed, was to understand how much water is moving through their sewer and storm systems. And I was like, what do you mean, you don't know how much water is moving? They're like, we have no idea. […] If your sensors are accurate within 30% or so that would be great.”
[7:25] “[If] we focused on the municipal market [and] basically […] created the Google traffic map for sewers, then we could deploy the sensors at scale. […] And then that allows us to ultimately really map how water is moving through these systems, and then how climate impacts are affecting what's happening within the systems, both above and below ground.”
[8:25] “We're not a sensor company per se, we're a data company that developed our own sensors, because so many sensors are so expensive.”
[16:25] “We rebranded ourselves as a climate tech company after we raised […] $2 million […] in 2020. And that allowed us to do a couple of things. So first off, it broadened us beyond water, as far as investors are concerned, of course, but it also helped us as a company […] internalize the fact that what we were doing ties to climate change and climate adaptation. And that made a lot of the work that we're doing much more meaningful to the people who are working with us.”
[29:39] “What we're really doing now is focusing on the insights that come out of the data that we're capturing. […] We're actually tying climate data to what's happening below ground and looking at […] combining climate intelligence and critical infrastructure and then allowing cities to identify how they can best take action. And we're doing that […] with our […] stormwater urban flood risk index, where we pull in data not just physical or geographic data, but also socio economic parameters as well, because that's a really good indicator of where issues are within the city. […] So helping is really focused on communities in areas that need it most, tying that to real data, and then pulling in the overall climate intelligence into that as well.”
Rating: 💧💧💧
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify | Google
🕰️ 36 min | 🗓️ 02/03/2022
✅ Time saved: 34 min
Additional Links:
Water Foundry
