Profiles of Women Working In STEM
Meena Sankaran
Environmental Engineer and Entrepreneur
Meena Sankaran’s fixation with water began when she was a child. She channeled her childhood experience of having just 1 hour of clean water a day to founding Ketos, a water intelligence startup that delivers actionable metrics on water safety and sustainability to transform how businesses and people think about water.
KETOS is a unique solution delivering water intelligence with innovative hardware and software as an interaction of Water + IoT + Data Science for building smarter, safer and sustainable water grid management systems. It stems for Meena’s belief that, “Smart water data can be instrumental and revolutionize how people and businesses think about water.”
KETOS has significant intellectual property through trade secrets and patents for the hardware that’s capable of being self-powered leak detector in water distribution to a Industrial-grade single modular system capable of detecting 20+ toxins and parameters in water continuously without any manual intervention. They also have significant IP in the robust software platform that has tiered analytics with advanced diagnostics, predictive intelligence and location mapped analytics for proactive water management.
“We can’t act on what we don’t measure and KETOS solution is designed, manufactured and built in the US to drive the automation in Industrial IoT for dynamic understanding of a critical resource such as ‘Water.’”
Meena’s passion for technology and leveraging the best of hardware, software and advanced sciences is showcased in how KETOS is built through a very interdisciplinary team of cross-functional experts across a spectrum of skills. She has created a unique culture, quite unlike what’s known in Silicon Valley to cherish her people and team. Her values and principles stem from her upbringing as she shares her journey from Mumbai, India to study Electrical Engineering in Texas, demonstrating how grit and support of others carried her through challenging moments.
Meena’s contributions are recognized around the world. She was recently awarded the Goldman Sachs Builders & Innovators award, honoring 100 most intriguing entrepreneurs in the world as well as honored by Forbes as one of the awe-inspiring entrepreneurs for her work with PRERNA, a nonprofit she founded to support refugees in gaining independence and stability.
“Pursue your dreams and channel all of your invaluable energy towards problems that give you a strong sense of purpose with unshakeable tenacity and determination, for there’s no limit to what one can achieve.”
Profile courtesy of wogrammer.org. Read the full story.
