Interview With Guy Cohen, CPO At Kando
Kando is at the forefront of AI and IoT innovation in the field of wastewater analysis. Kando’s breakthrough solution was developed in the south of Israel, an area known for innovative water conservation measures. Through its wastewater intelligence technology, the company empowers its clients to take action based on data and insights, so that they can fulfill their goals and vision with regards to public and environmental health.
Interview with Guy Cohen, CPO at Kando.
Easy Engineering: What are the main areas of activity of the company?
Guy Cohen: Kando is an innovative digital solution to support improved wastewater quality, efficiency of utilities, environmental health, and sustainable ways of life. They are ideally placed to leverage their expertise to tackle a range of questions whose answers might be found in our water systems: detecting future pandemics, overcoming high levels of drug use, reflecting the quality of the population’s diets, and more.
E.E: What’s the news about new products?
G.C: Kando’s latest product suite is comprised of two key components: Kando Quality Pulse, and Kando Community Health Pulse. Kando Quality Pulse supports users revamp the way they look at their water network, providing a cost-effective way to improve data analytics capabilities – helping municipalities and governments measure key data points in previously inaccessible ways.
Kando Community Health Pulse is Kando’s foremost product centered on WBE (Wastewater-Based Epidemiology). It supports healthcare authorities and decision-makers with both protection against diseases and other public health risks, and promotion of public health campaigns. Through sophisticated wastewater intelligence, healthcare providers can understand the spread of viral diseases and pandemics, formulate a response, and track metrics like nutrient consumption, which are indicative of public health trends.
E.E: What are the ranges of products?
G.C: Kando’s product suite provides actionable insights for use by utilities, wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), and other users. Kando’s Pulse products equip users with a holistic view for what is going on in a given wastewater network, realizing wastewater’s potential to function as a ‘crystal ball’ capable of offering unrivalled insights into what’s going on above ground.
Community Health combines Kando’s market-leading wastewater analysis experience and its partners’ virology expertise, to offer a service that can detect virus outbreaks no matter the variant and pinpoint infection hotspots in city and local communities.
Taken as a whole, Kando’s product range is designed improve wastewater quality through 24/7 real-time data, and because the Kando data gathering units stream wastewater data to the cloud at all times, no network event goes undetected.
E.E: At what stage is the market where you are currently active?
G.C: Today’s wastewater intelligence market is comprised of a range of disparate solutions, and authorities largely lack access to solutions that integrate software, hardware, and laboratory testing and analysis. Kando’s mission is to make a data-driven, AI-powered wastewater intelligence service available and accessible for any relevant authority. As such, public awareness of wastewater technology and analysis will expand exponentially, leaving the market with potential for significant growth.
E.E: What can you tell us about market trends?
G.C: The water industry, in particular water companies, are facing growing challenges in order to serve their customers: shortages in water resources, non-revenue water and the need to deliver more for less along with growing consumption and climate change. With such pressures there is a need to improve efficiency in order to deliver essential services including safe and secure drinking water, storm-water management and wastewater management. In fact, these challenges and their increasing complexity necessitate a paradigm shift to the next generation of water systems beyond traditional water and sewage infrastructure.
In terms of community health, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought the concept of Community Health into the public domain in a significant way, with many communities and WWTPs trialing the application of Community Health monitoring for the first time. As the world moves towards a future living with endemic COVID, and with the threat of other pathogens emerging in the future, there is a clear need to maintain existing community health applications and develop them further.
E.E: What are the most innovative products marketed?
G.C: Kando’s best in class wastewater intelligence solution is unparalleled and represents the latest in wastewater analysis and monitoring technology. The use cases for Kando’s technology are broad and are set to grow as the technology develops, and as the market grows so will the applications for such innovative solutions.
E.E: What estimations do you have for 2022?
G.C: We anticipate that more and more organizations and governments will be on the lookout for a wide range of solutions that can help in getting a continuous flow of data about improving public health, and wastewater is the key to accessing that data.