NEER just finished up it’s first paid Beta with the City of Raytown, Mo. – a Kansas City suburb with 30,000 residents. NEER is a machine learning and data analysis platform for water and sewer systems.
Elango Thevar, NEER CEO
Raytown is the first municipality to work with NEER, which is both a data analysis platform and a service. The company takes what data the municipality has, which may be digital or on paper – some going back to the 1940’s and 1950’s. It digitizes it, if needed, and adds open source data like temperature, precipitation, soil type, traffic – from sources like the U.S. Geological Survey, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and Natural Resources Conservation Service. It has also developed a tool to ‘fill in’ missing data.
“We help fill out all the information using some of the tools that we developed,” CEO Elango Thevar told the 4thEst8. “We rely on county data, or when the building was constructed, and then we kind of roll it back in time… also we do a lot of clustering analysis to figure out (based on dated construction materials and techniques) there is (for example) a bunch of… vitrified clay pipe in a certain location.”
With a bunch of ‘clean’ data NEER then algorithmicly estimates the likelihood of failure for specific assets like a stretch of sanitary sewer pipe or manhole – so the municipality can better form a proactive strategic plan and better estimate allocation of long term investments.
Jose Leon Jr., Raytown Dir. of Public Works
“NEER put the city two to three years forward and saved the city hundreds of thousands of dollars we would have spent using traditional methods,” said Raytown Director of Public Works Jose Leon Jr. said in a statement. Raytown has been working with NEER since May, 2020. NEERs report just came out.
“Can we scale this? Can we make it kind of a de-facto platform for the entire United States for these utilities?,” Thevar asked, rhetorically. “One way to do it is partnership. (We are) also looking at (it) from a regulatory perspective so we can actually strike and implement this program with other states at the state level, so we can reach out to all these communities.”
NEER has been headquartered in T-Rex in St. Louis after being awarded a 2020 Arch Grant (which required relocation for a year for the formerly Kansas City-area startup.) The company launched in April 2020, has three full time and three part time employees. Altogether the startup has raised $350,000. In addition to the Arch Grant NEER raised $200,000 in pre-seed from Elemental Excelerator of Honolulu, Hawaii and $100,000 in convertible notes from Gener8tor of Wisconsin.
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