Water scarcity is a growing phenomena and every corner of the world is slowly getting impacted. Massive urbanization and climate change has further reduced the ground water .
Worst will be situation to find clean drinking water and many industries will be directly impacted by clean water scarcity.
One such industry is beverage industry that relies 100% on water for their products.
While the groundwater in most parts of the world has been continuously declining, the localised factories of the beverage industry put a lot of pressure on the ground table. There is protest in every part of the world that we witness, building up against these beverage companies.
Water renewal technology is the answer to proper usage of water that saves rest of humanity from water scarcity.
To understand the whole science behind water renewal technology and how that helps the beverage industry to meet their commercial water requirement, Uravu Labs developed a breakthrough 100% renewable water technology.
The WaaS (Water as a Service) model, which sells packaged renewable water to the hospitality sector.
“Groundwater is non-renewable, and its heavy usage in the beverage industry demands immediate attention. To disrupt the highly unsustainable beverage space Uravu’s renewable water technology, provides a highly scalable and fullfill the requirement for the beverage industry says Pradeep Garg, Co-Founder of Uravu Labs.
The company recently received approval for a grant of approximately from the Facility of Low Carbon Technology Deployment (FLCTD) to further refine their prototypes and conduct testing and validation.
Incepted in 2019 by Pardeep Garg, Swapnil Shrivastav, Venkatesh R, and Govinda Balaji, Uravu Labs is dedicated to building a new type of atmospheric water generator that is 100% renewable.
Going further SMEVenture which is in the frontline to promote the Start-Ups, present their growth stories roped up Pradeep Garg, Co-Founder of Uravu Labs, and present you Uravu’s growth story, their vision and mission.
Uravu has garnered Investors like Speciale Invest, PeterYolles (EchoRiver Capital, US), Soren Schroder (US), Shigeru Sumimoto (ConseluxCorporation, Japan), and Tomoki Kaneko (Kaneko Cord, Japan) within short period of time.
Read the excerpts:
SMEVenture: Uravu Labs creates water from air using only renewable energy and has deployed the Water as a Service business model-(WAAS) for bottled renewable water. Tell us something about how you started the concept.
Pradeep Garg: Our journey began with the goal of reducing groundwater usage, with a primary focus on the beverage industry, which accounts for a significant portion of groundwater consumption.
We switched from solid to liquid desiccants and upgraded our 5 LPD (liters per day) machines to accomplish this. We currently operate with two sales models: Direct Asset sales, which offer 200 LPD and 2000 LPD (liters per day) machines, and the WaaS (Water as a Service) model, which sells packaged renewable water to the hospitality sector.
In the WaaS (Water as a Service) model, the customers pay only for the water they use, i.e., the water bottles. These bottles are available in two variants: recyclable plastic bottles and pristine, reusable glass bottles.
SMEVenture: Renewable water is highly in demand. What kind of technology is in use at Uravu and what is the present capacity to produce renewable water? How does this help address water scarcity in commercial premises?
Pradeep Garg: Our machine uses thermal energy (Waste Heat, Solar, or Biomass) and desiccant material to generate ~ Renewable water from moisture in the air. The technology utilizes desiccants and runs in two phases in a cycle.
During absorption, water vapour in the air is absorbed by a desiccant material and continues to do so until the desiccant is fully saturated. After which, thermal heat (less than 80o Celsius) is applied, allowing the desorption process to begin.
In desorption, the heat applied (in the form of waste heat, solar heat, or biomass), allows the desiccant to release the absorbed water vapour.
The water vapour is then condensed in an air-cooled condenser, forming pure distilled water.
At present, our systems have the ability to generate 1,000 litres of water daily, and we intend to expand this capacity to tens of thousands of litres per day.
When we look at the beverage industry, it consumes a lot of water, about 1500 Billion litres/ Yr of water.
To put this number in perspective, whatever water human beings need for their drinking purposes, about 20% of that is floating around us in the form of beverage products around us (either in the form of plain water bottles or soft drinks or alcoholic products like beer and liquor).
Analysis of the water footprint of the top 20 beverage companies suggests that more than 45% of water is sourced from groundwater by these companies.
SMEVenture: The end-to-end production of the bottling water that you have started, who you aim to serve through this model of concept and the amount of effort in terms of technology deployment and finance you garnered for this.
Pradeep Garg: Uravu targets the hospitality and corporate sectors as the primary customer for the WaaS (Water as a Service) model. These industries are always seeking innovative and sustainable options to stand out from their competitors.
Uravu’s solution, bottled 100% Renewable Water, perfectly fits them. Additionally, by adopting Uravu’s water, corporate entities can take a significant step towards fulfilling their Net-Zero goals as Renewable Water is the most environmentally-friendly option available in the market.
We are also planning to expand the WaaS model to other types of non-alcoholic beverages like tonic water, ginger ale, flavoured water and more.
Under this model, Uravu installs the equipment to produce, process, and bottle the packaged renewable water.
This incurs a significant one-time investment and right now we are doing it with company funds.
Garg says ‘as we scale and prove the model, we will make it bankable, very similar to how solar PV projects are financed nowadays’.
SMEVenture: Uravu built a fully-functional 5 litre per day module and began working on securing test contracts from beverage manufacturers and real estate developers. Tell us about this concept?
Pradeep Garg: To build credibility and trust with customers during the early stages of our company, we chose to create smaller systems that allowed beverage companies to test Uravu’s new water technology, instead of waiting for larger capacities and taking a risk with it.
By doing so, we could establish and foster relationships with clients at an early stage, which we could leverage and expand upon later as we moved towards scaling up to higher capacities.
SMEVenture: Uravu Raised $2.3M in seed funding round in March with a total funding of $4.3 M so far. Tell us what helped you in raising the funds and from here how the expansion program will take place.
Pradeep Garg: Uravu was founded in 2019 and bootstrapped for the first 15 months received grants like XPRIZE, NIDHI-PRAYAS, ELEVATE (Govt of Karnataka), Amrut 2.0, and Danish Innovation Fund. Subsequently, Uravu raised the first venture round, the Pre-Seed round.
Speciale Invest from Chennai led this round, along with participation from individual investors from Japan and US. Following this, Uravu raised Seed round with Anicut as the lead investor, followed by Rocketship.vc, Verso, Vesta, Venture Catalysts, JITO, and many other international investors.
In August 2021, Uravu secured Pre-Seed equity funding to advance their product development and scale up to conduct early pilots with important customers in the real estate and beverages sectors. We found success with investors through LinkedIn, which allowed us to connect with almost 400 investors.
To achieve the year-end goal of producing 10,000 LPD, we will soon be looking for additional funds from investors.
SMEVenture: Who are you targeting to serve in the long run and how do you think this will help in addressing some of the pressing demands for water mainly in industrial and commercial spaces?
Pradeep Garg: Our ultimate objective is to establish a B2B model for the beverage industry, wherein they purchase our machines to infuse Renewable water into a majority of their beverages. However, before we achieve this goal, we are adopting a B2B2C approach to target the hospitality industry.
This will enable us to promote the Uravu brand before entering a large market such as the beverage industry. Additionally, it will help generate substantial revenue, which can exponentially increase our capacity expansion rate.
Our goal is to provide Technology that utilises inexhaustible atmospheric moisture and only renewable energy to produce high-quality drinking water.