Water quality monitoring in agribusinesses is especially important in countries like Egypt, where the agricultural sector utilizes nearly 85% of the country's share of Nile water. This staggering amount has led officials and innovators like the Conative Labs team to develop ways to safeguard the country's water resources and lower the rate of water consumption.

The Solution

Conative Labs has developed an IoT solution known as Nilebot, a real-time water-quality and monitoring alarm system that measures crucial parameters in water such as dissolved oxygen, salinity, acidity and temperatures.

We first tested the use of this product in fish farms, but have since expanded the use case to agribusinesses and are currently working with the UNICEF Water, Sanitation and Hygiene teams in the MENA region to better understand how to deploy and ensure cost-effective and efficient quality water monitoring  in refugee camps. 

Through the IoT device, all the data is sent through a mobile network or WiFi to our software where the fish farmer can monitor the data and get alarmed of crucial changes through receiving an SMS. On average, we help fish farmers save up to 30% of their fish feed, as well as protecting most of the yield from sudden changes in the water environment. 

Milestones

During the last year, we enhanced the experience of using our solution through adding a mobile app which has a very simple user experience. Through manipulating the technology, we built other solutions to help other agribusinesses, like monitoring fertilizers mixers across fertilizing lines, and building prototypes for more sophisticated solutions to monitor and control irrigation lines, especially pivots. Regarding growth, during the last year we doubled the team and tripled the revenues. Now, we are serving more than 80 fish farms in 11 different countries in the MENA region and Europe.

Prototyping and Testing

Our prototyping process is very simple and direct. We identify the problem at the very beginning, start discussions with potential customers about the problems they face, and we start solving it using technology. After that we gather their feedback on prototypes and recommendations. We divide recommendations into two main types: the first one is very general like; did you like the app? Was it easy to use? The second one is very specific; like what are the parameters you would like to see very fast in a summary? Either the average or maximum and minimum readings? So, the prototyping is an ongoing process even after launching the product itself.

Field-testing on a fish farm

We are constantly pleased to know that our IoT solution is assisting farmers save their yields- for example one of the workers in a fish farm told us of a time that the mobile app notified him that dissolved oxygen dropped and as a result saved almost all the yield after knowing this information.

More videos on customer feedback and testimonials can be found here:

Open Source and Business Model

Our plan is to make interfacing with sensors open source so that developers can apply this to different devices, increasing the scope  of how water quality monitoring can be used. 
Previously, we exclusively sold the hardware component directly to customers; the plan now is to implement  a subscription model which makes our solution more affordable and allows for recurring revenues. We have already tested the subscription model with a couple of customers and have received positive feedback from this.

Challenges

The biggest challenge we are addressing now is helping the world make the best use of available resources; we did that with fish farmers, and we are going to replicate this in other industries. We are using technology to monitor and ultimately save on crucial water resources. 

Way Forward

We are hoping to collaborate with other institutes, like the World Food Programme, to make the best use of data we collected, as well as R&D institutions to help us build case studies and develop better products. In terms of business development, we would like to partner with other industry players in the value chain like fish feeding companies or machinery companies.

Our goals simply are to grow more as a team and serve more customers, across different industries helping them save more resources. 

Throughout our journey with the Venture Fund, we were connected to a group of the best mentors we have ever worked with who were very dedicated and helpful. The mentors remained steadfast in helping us achieve our business goals, ensuring that we followed a steady path to scale.