WaterSmart Seeks to Build Out Web-based Services to Conserve Water

[Corrected 6/8/11, 1:10 pm to show Peter Yolles is CEO, instead of Rob Steiner.] WaterSmart Software was founded two years ago in San Francisco, but co-founder Rob Steiner lives in San Diego. So when the cleantech software developer recently raised $900,000 in seed funding, I sat down with Steiner to discuss WaterSmart’s plans for developing software designed to help water districts and their customers conserve water.

Before starting the company, Steiner specialized in water deals as an investment consultant. Co-founder and CEO Peter Yolles, based in Marin, CA, was working as a water management consultant with water districts and other agencies. The two began to think about starting company focused on improving water use after they noticed a surge in cleantech startups focused on improving energy efficiencies, Steiner says.

Water has long been a critical resource throughout the semi-arid American West, and Steiner says the price of water is increasing about 1.5 times faster than the price of electricity.

(That doesn’t explain the whole story, however. Water economist David Zetland of Wageningen University in the Netherlands has argued that water pricing in California is drastically “underpriced” in ways that don’t reflect the scarcity and true cost of water production. Zetland also contends that water utility rates here tend to actually discourage conservation.)

In any event, U.S. residents use a tremendous amount of water every day—about 150 gallons a person, according to LeakBird, a San Francisco company that specializes in leak detection. In California, average daily water consumption varies widely. It is about 280 gallons per person in Sacramento and 97 gallons per person in the Bay Area. In San Diego, daily water use is currently at 143 gallons per capita (down from

Pages: Page 1, Page 2, Page 3

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.