Aquagenuity tracks water quality in real time using a business intelligence tool that allows consumers to search their ZIP code to learn exactly what’s in their local water supply. By digitizing water quality data using predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and data science, people can make more informed decisions for the long-term health of their communities. This week, Kristen Meinzer talks to Doll Avant, founder and C.E.O. at Atlanta-based Aquagenuity, to discuss what her company is doing to help solve the water crisis. Invesco Distributors, Inc.
Aquagenuity tracks water quality in real time using a business intelligence tool that allows consumers to search their ZIP code to learn exactly what’s in their local water supply. By digitizing water quality data using predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and data science, people can make more informed decisions for the long-term health of their communities. This week, Kristen Meinzer talks to Doll Avant, founder and C.E.O. at Atlanta-based Aquagenuity, to discuss what her company is doing to help solve the water crisis. Invesco Distributors, Inc.
Kristen: It’s common knowledge that the molecular make-up of water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. H–2–O. These molecules surround us everywhere. The sky, the air, the earth… flowing from our faucets, filling our cups and … providing the basic building blocks of the human form. Simple science, right?
In addition to those H20 molecules, there are other compounds that end up flowing out of our taps– and it’s not always stuff you want to have floating around your drinking glass.
Doll: if there's any kind of toxin or contamination in the air or in the soil, it ultimately is going to end up in our water supply.
And over time…
Doll: toxins in our water are building up in our systems. And a lot of times some of them are what they call forever chemicals because we don't know how to actually break them down and get them out of our system.
That’s Doll Avant, CEO of Aquagenuity, a company she founded in 2017.
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She had linked the death of her father to problems with his local water supply, and couldn’t sit back and watch this problem continue.
Doll: I came across an obscure report, linking high levels of arsenic and local water supplies to spikes in diabetes // so two weeks after his funeral, I started this company because I really was asking the question, you know, how many of us are being exposed to significant health impacts?
Doll and her company are tackling some of the world’s biggest health issues with innovative – and community-building – solutions.
BEAT
KRISTEN: I’m Kristen Meinzer, and this is Innovation Uncovered from Invesco QQQ…
This episode, I’m chatting with Doll Avant... a data scientist whose reservoir of knowledge is perpetually filled to the brim.. about water health. And how her work strives to provide the public with the information –
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and tools – they need to take action and avoid potential harm from the water supply.
MUSIC OUT
Kristen Meinzer: Hello Doll. Welcome to Innovation Uncovered.
Doll Avant: Hello. I'm so happy to be here. I'm so excited.
Kristen Meinzer: So to start things off...maybe you could tell us a bit about your background? What were you doing before you launched Aquagenuity?
Doll Avant: So I was born and raised in the SWAT: Southwest Atlanta for those who don't know Frederick Douglas High school, we’re the Astros - black and gold all day, very proud. A lot of luminaries came from my area of town and from my school from Martin Luther king to our former mayor to Killer Mike. After I left high school, I went to Harvard university for undergrad, and I loved everything about it, except for the snow. After that, I went into corporate finance for a few years and ended up becoming a serial entrepreneur. So, I went back to Harvard school of business to study data analytics and I was working with my mentor in water. He's now 82 years old.
Kristen Meinzer: Would you mind- can I ask what was his name?
Doll Avant: His name is Percy Jones.
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He’s the first African-American to have his own bottled water plant in the United States.
He actually invented a water filter, received an award from Congressional black caucus. And I was working with him in the water space when Flint happened. I was working on water filters specifically when that crisis hit national international headlines, that's why I was paying attention. And we would go in and have meetings with these big companies, huge companies. And they would say, oh my God, we love this technology, but we don't need it. Our water's fine.
And I'm looking at the data. I'm like, no, no, your water's not fine. So I think when Flint happened, people kind of realized, wait a minute, this is not a third world issue. This is happening right here in the United States. So my background, it all just kind of led a perfect storm to being in the right place at the right time when Flint unfortunately happened and it's still happening to folks. And that's what led me to this work at Aquagenuity.
Kristen Meinzer: You were a serial entrepreneur and a data scientist and your mentor worked in water. Were you interested in water before connecting with this mentor?
Doll Avant: I was interested in big problems.
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Being an entrepreneur, one of the things you learn really quickly is if you want to be successful, you find the biggest problem that you're uniquely qualified to solve.
Kristen Meinzer: Doll, love that answer, but I also gotta say, you are qualified to do so many things. Why did you choose to work with water? What really led you in that direction versus something else?
Doll Avant: Oh, absolutely. So it was a very personal story for me. Because I was working with my mentor, you know, Flint happened. We're starting to get a lot of questions and interests about water quality. The things that are needed, which is real-time monitoring- is not possible. The technology doesn't exist. So I was leaning into building that and just really researching how water impacts health, how's this happening in the United States?
You know, what are the disadvantages to, you know, black and brown communities or low income communities and seeing some of those patterns over time. And while I was doing all this research, my dad got sick. So my dad was a professor. 72 years at the time, of relative health.
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He actually used to work for NASA years ago in the Neil Armstrong days. He was a statistician.
So fast forward - he was just kind of out of the blue, diagnosed with diabetes, right? So we all think, oh, people get old, they don't take care of themselves. Like it's whatever.
But only because I was in the middle of all this research, I came across an obscure report, linking high levels of arsenic in local water supplies to spikes in diabetes, like this had been researched. And I was like, no one's heard of this. What do you mean? What's going on?
So my dad actually passed away from kidney complications in June of 2017. And so two weeks after his funeral, I started this company because I really was asking the question, you know, how many of us are being exposed to significant health impacts because of environmental factors and we don't know it, we're not connecting the dots?
Kristen Meinzer:: Oh, that is quite a story- I’m so sorry. Uh...can you share any other examples of what dangerous water exposure does... or has done?
Doll Avant: One of the stories that I told in my Ted Talk was the story of Camp Lejeune.
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So this is a military base in North Carolina. And from 1955 to 1987, about 900,000 service men and their families were actually poisoned by the water on this base.
And no one really knew. No one really connected the dots. Like, you know, kids are getting cancer. It's just horrible. ALS. Like all this- Hodgkin's disease, right? Finally 30 years later, they started to trace it back to the water. And then they did all this research.
And so far, the government has spent almost $4 billion in damages to these families and things like that. So if that can happen on a government site, right, this is public record, you know. How much more could it possibly be impacting folks in their homes? And like I said, we just never know about it. Like even what happened with Flint, the only reason that it became kind of this big story is because there were some moms- you know, go women- who were just really persistent.
And they were like, no, something's wrong with my kid. Like, our hair's falling out. There's a rash, like, something's wrong. And they kept being told that everything was fine. And they were like, “no, it's not fine.” And that's one of the reasons why the story broke because they started getting all these test results back.
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It's just like, we don't have information until people get sick, which is wrong. So how do we reverse that?
Like, it's just a data gap. Like they- we just really don't know about one fifth of utilities. Don't actually know if they have lead lines in their service area or not.
Somebody's got to focus on it. So that's why I decided, let's do that. For Aquagenuity that's our work. We focus on that specific area and try to bridge that gap using data. And hopefully we will save lives in the process.
TRANSITION
Kristen: Bridging that data gap may seem like a lofty goal. Especially with all the unknown issues in the country’s pipelines.
With so many inevitable, undiscovered problems out there, Doll and her team have solutions to filter out some of those concerns.
The foundation of Aquagenuity’s work is water testing. Because the more detail you have about bad water, questionable pipes, and damaged infrastructure… the more you can do to fix what’s going wrong.
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Kristen Meinzer: I mean, it seems pretty obvious that bad water would lead to bad health, but can you explain exactly how this happens?
Doll Avant: As humans in our bodies, we're 68 to 71 percent water. Right? So most of our cellular health and all of that can be traced back to environmental factors. If there's any kind of toxin or contamination in the air or in the soil, it ultimately is going to end up in our water supply.
Because we live in the western world, we don't perish instantly when we drink water, but over time, any toxins, you know, water carries everything, dissolves everything. Toxins in our water are building up in our systems.
And a lot of times some of them are, are what they call forever chemicals because we don't know how to actually break them down and get them out of our systems. Lead for example is a neurotoxin. It disrupts brain development, especially in children. Toxins that are very common in water have been linked to heart problems, diabetes, Alzheimer's, forms of cancer-
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-ALS like the list goes on and on.
And so, because these things develop, you know, years down the road, sometimes we don't make the link back to our environment or to water, but t's very fundamental to our health.
Kristen Meinzer: So, really the main focus of Aquageneunity is mass water testing. Why is this so important to what you do - and can you tell me what can be gained from mass water testing?
Doll Avant: So, think of it this way, when you have a weather forecast, you can go on your phone or go on an app. And it'll tell you if it's going to rain close to where you are within the next 15 minutes so that, well, if I'm leaving the house, let me grab my umbrella.
We should have that same level of information for water quality because water actually changes as often as the weather does.
Anytime that water is displaced or anything is moving with the soil, if there's any kind of overflow, those things are going straight into our water supply and coming out of taps in many cases. So if we actually map water quality down to the local level, we could have a water quality forecast. The same way we have a weather forecast.
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I didn't know when I started this work that this had never been done before.
This is such a really complex data problem to solve.
I just did it anyway.
Kristen Meinzer: It's hopeful work! The way you talk about it makes me feel... honestly, less full of existential dread than I normally feel because you're actually working on solutions. So it’s pretty clear, making all of these connections is super important. And, on that note, can you tell me more about your data collection system?
Doll Avant: Yeah. So we live in a world where humans are the sensors, alerting us to water quality problems. So I'm like, well, why can't we use technology? All of the advances in data analytics and all of that. Like, most people can't tell you- the EPA does not know what's coming out of your tap right now.
And I just thought that was backwards.
So, I started doing research and really trying to understand this problem because in my mind, it's like, why can't they put in their zip code or go to some website somewhere and understand what's in their water to know if it's safe?
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And quickly realized why it hadn't been done before, because it's just a really hard problem to solve. So for example, in the United States, there's about 151,000 individual water systems. So the way they report data, collect data, sample, test water is very fragmented. And so I set out to aggregate all of that data into a single interface. Took about a year and a half to do.
The way that water is tested now- let's say in the Atlanta area, five, six million residents- they might sample a couple dozen homes for lead and they, based on those readings, that's how they determine the report for your area. Well, that's just not accurate. Okay?
Because everyone has different pipes. So even if the water is perfect, when it leaves the water treatment plant, it still has to travel the last mile to your home. And in that last mile is where things like Flint happened. Because if your pipes are old, if there's any kind of corrosion, there's construction, if there's water main breaks, if you live near a factory or a military base or a Superfund site.
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Anything that's entering those pipes along that last mile, goes into the pipes and is many times odorless or colorless.
There's a lot of exposure to what's in the water and very little real-time information about what's in the water.
So our work at Aquagenuity is to bridge that gap.
Kristen Meinzer: And how exactly is that done and what is the Aqua Score because that's central to what Aquagenuity is?
Doll Avant: Yes. So the future of the world is there are sensors and things are happening in an automated fashion, but a lot of those sensors don't exist right now. So what we do is we provide water test kits to folks to test in their homes, to test at local schools and folks that sign up for our the Guardians of H2O program, which we'll talk about later.
You fill up a little vial with water, put it back in the box, you mail it back. It goes straight to a certified lab and you get a full analysis of what was found in that water.
That allows us to take that information and create what we call an Aqua Score. So this is a proprietary algorithm that I wrote.
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So the EPA tests for about 93 contaminants -ish. And there's over a hundred thousand toxins that we know are in our water supplies. And a lot of them are not illegal.
So that's a big gap.
So if you use the water DNA test kit at your sink, you send it off to the lab and it comes back in about a week. You get a full report of what was found in that water. What does this mean for my health? What type of filter do I need?
So you have to have a filter that's certified by the NSF to remove the geo-specific contaminants where you live. It's not going to be the same at my house versus yours.
So all of that is a bunch of raw data. It doesn't really mean a lot. But what if we turn it into a number?
That was my thinking. What if I turned it into a score? So the same way we look at weather, if you open your weather app right now, there's a temperature at the top.
So I wrote the Aqua score, the algorithm to do the same thing for water quality. It can be pushed through an API so that data can show up on other public facing sites that people already use every day, right?
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So imagine searching for real estate. Now you'll be able to search a home by it's AquaScore. By water quality. And that wasn't possible before we built this database.
So the AquaScore translates all this information and makes it meaningful to the average consumer.
Kristen Meinzer: Wow. And I imagine this is more and more important in today's world than it ever has been before with climate change, with severe weather, with water becoming more and more precious than it's ever been in the past. I mean, water has always been precious, but at this point in history, clean water isn't as abundant.
Doll Avant: Yes. Absolutely. We're living in a very interesting time and hopefully we can all rally together to do something about it. Right? So, if you want to take the future facing view of all of this, according to the United Nations, by 2030, there'll be a 40% greater demand for clean water.
We can actually start to predict bigger changes that we will later see in climate change and hopefully get ahead of it and predict and prevent some of these crises before they occur.
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And so to be able to monitor water quality to help people make better decisions and better understand how the environment is impacting their health.
I think it’s really important work.
Kristen Meinzer: What's some of the feedback you've gotten from folks who've been testing their water with Aquagenuity?
Doll Avant: It is amazing. So one of our hashtags is, is “data to the people.” Cause we're just really focused on giving people information so they know better, they can do better. Right?
We're not really interested in kind of pointing the blame for who's responsible for doing you know, the pollution we're just providing data. So what that does is that actually allows for a corporation or for a municipality to use the data, to get ahead of and predict and prevent these problems. Right?
So we're partnering with them so that they have insight.
So something as simple as us providing that transparency, like a dashboard that a city official can look at and say, oh, this neighborhood is going orange just going red, right? So that they can be proactive. Those are the types of tools that we provide and we take the data and feed it to
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those agencies and officials that can actually take action to help protect communities.
So, they can, let's say put in remediation efforts, or let's say we put in new pipes, but now we can monitor that. So we know going forward that everything is still a-okay.
Kristen Meinzer: Mm. And how many homes do you need to test the water to get the best data sample?
Doll Avant: So currently our database covers about 272 million Americans.
Anybody that has a water system that serves 3000 people or more, that data is in our database. It's pretty great coverage right now, but what we want to lean into some of these rural areas. Some of the folks who don't have as consistent testing from the state agency, we want to help supplement that data.
In order to really get an accurate, real time water quality forecast for a city, say a metropolitan area, we like to cover at least 35 to 45% of the area. And once we get that coverage-
‘Cause we're still training our algorithms, we're still training the machine learning models so that they can do it themselves.
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We get the data from the community and then we measure the two, right? And we see how accurate the computer is versus the sample testing.
But this is a huge uptick from the standard testing. Right now is less than 1%. So we're increasing that significantly. So once we go past 20% range, we feel great about it, but we want to get it closer to the 40% range for this first round of real time water quality forecast that we'll be publishing.
TRANSITION
Kristen: Doll's goal of increasing the number of samples included is crucial for Aquagenuity to provide an accurate representation of every communities’ water health...
She says that the Guardians of H2O program - in partnership with companies and local municipalities - will help increase sample numbers, as well as expand environmental literacy and prepare nearly one million new Guardians for future careers in science and tech.
You may have concerns about your water supply. How can you acquire a testing kit?
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I had some of those same questions, and Doll, of course, had answers.
Kristen Meinzer: Let's say I am one of the people in, you know, one of the cities that have lead in the water. Let's say, I find that out. What do I do then? Do I write to you? Is there a recommendation of what to do if you find something?
Doll Avant: Yes, so the next version of the web app, and then the mobile app that'll be out next year for a United Nations World Water Day, which is March 22nd every year. It will recommend- here's a filter that's specifically certified by the NSF to deal with the toxins that have been found in your home. We're also starting to connect communities with resources. People can't afford say a filter, right, that they might need. And so we have those corporate partners who are stepping up.
And to your point how many people need to monitor their water for us to have really accurate data models? This is something that we're far ahead of the field because the United Nations has the SDGs, sustainable development goals for 2030, and they're going to have to extend them out.
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But there's 17 SDGs and number six is clean water, but most people don't know that target 6B specifically is a bullet point under there, it talks about the importance of hyper-local communities getting involved in monitoring water quality and wastewater management.
How do you engage an individual to even think about, let alone take action on something like monitoring their own water?
So we've, we found a way. Like people get really excited about becoming Guardians of H2O.
You get a Cape, like it's really cool.
Like you become really activated in this movement. So you test your own water in your home or your school, you know, adopts a program. That helps us to get the numbers up, to get enough data, to really build an accurate model for a city.
Kristen Meinzer: Wow. So is the Guardians of H2O program, is that all over the country? Is that just in certain cities? Where is that?
Doll Avant: It's available for anyone, anywhere in the country. Guardian's of H2O is a virtual program that's designed to bring communities together around environmental literacy.
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So we have a curriculum for K through 12, where students can learn about testing their own water, how water impacts their body. But also teaches them to be innovators around solutions for environmental justice and climate change and extending the life of the planet.
So we've had a lot of great support from,
all these huge companies right here, the epicenter of Atlanta.
And so what that allowed us to do is to adopt local schools in this area, had the corporate support. So a lot of times those corporations will underwrite the schools. So it's not an expense out of their budget.
Kids get really excited. About the program and about engaging. And so we're just onboarding them as quickly as possible.
Doll Avant: So our goal is to have a million Guardians by the end of 2022.
So as you start to take steps that are beneficial to the environment, now you're actually getting incentivized to do that. So it becomes this kind of snowball effect. We found that corporations and cities really do respond when consumers just say, “Hey enough, don't pollute our environment.”
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I feel like when we all do this, this is how we change the world.
BEAT
Kristen Meinzer: Doll, this has just been such a joy, so inspiring. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today.
Doll Avant: I thank you for having and hosting this conversation.
OUTRO
KRISTEN: Thanks for listening to Innovation Uncovered from Invesco QQQ.
On the next episode, we’ll hear from Jerek Theo Lovey, a founder of Take-Two Foods, a company that is determined to get the world on board with food upcycling. Which can save water in a different way…
Jerek Lovey:...upcycling saves hundreds of gallons of water, a tremendous amount of land, a tremendous amount of energy because we're using this grain twice.
Subscribe to Innovation Uncovered, and if you like what you hear, leave us a review.
Thanks for listening.
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Episode Disclaimer
The opinions expressed are those of the speakers are based on current market conditions and are subject to change. Without notice these opinions may differ from those of other Invesco investment professionals. Invesco is not affiliated with T brand studio, Kristen Meinzer or any of the subjects or companies referenced in this episode. This content should not be construed as an endorsement for or a recommendation to invest in any of the companies referenced in this episode, Invesco Distributors Inc.