Turn on a tap to wash your hands. Notice how much water hits your palms, bounces off and disappears down the drain. Now imagine this happening hundreds of times a day across an office building, alongside hidden leaks and cooling systems that use millions of litres of water.
How much of it is actually being used, and how much is simply going to waste?
Chennai-based, IIT Madras-incubated startup EarthFokus is trying to answer that question. Founded in 2019 by Arun Subramanian and Rishi Vandan, the water-tech company helps commercial buildings monitor consumption, identify leaks, recover water lost through evaporation and reduce everyday usage.
Its three solutions, WaterOS, EcoVapure and WaterFokus, tackle different parts of the problem. Together, the company says, they have helped over 130 commercial buildings save more than five billion litres of water.
It began with a tap
EarthFokus started with a small experiment. In 2019, Arun, an engineer, was approached by a neighbour who wanted to explore ways to reduce water consumption in their garden. Around the same time, Chennai was facing its Day Zero water crisis, when the city’s reservoirs ran critically low.
The crisis brought home the importance of conserving water, but Arun began by looking at something much more ordinary: a tap.
A conventional tap can release around 10 to 12 litres of water per minute, says Rishi. Yet, while washing our hands, much of that water can bounce off our palms and flow away unused.
The team developed a fixture that could bring the flow down to as little as 0.5 litres per minute. The idea was to use only as much water as the task required.
The product attracted attention during the COVID-19 pandemic, when frequent handwashing became essential. EarthFokus also secured early orders from corporate clients, including Cognizant.
What began as an experiment to reduce tap water flow grew into a water conservation startup incubated at IIT Madras.
But the founders encountered an unexpected hurdle. Customers often viewed the fixture as just another plumbing accessory, rather than a solution that could reduce a building’s water consumption.
“We had to change that perspective,” says Rishi. “I’m not a dealer or a trader who’s pushing products to you. Rather, we’re a solution provider who wants to enable reduction at your building.”
That realisation pushed EarthFokus beyond taps. Instead of simply selling water-saving products, the team began helping clients measure consumption and verify the savings their interventions delivered.
Three ways buildings can stop wasting water
As the startup worked with more buildings, it realised that inefficient taps were only one part of the problem. Hidden leaks, poor monitoring and water lost through cooling towers offered other opportunities for conservation.
1. WaterOS: Spotting leaks before they become bigger problems
Think of WaterOS as a monitoring system for a building’s water supply.
The platform uses IoT-enabled flow meters and sensors installed at key points, including supply lines, floors, washrooms and cooling towers. These continuously collect data and send it to the cloud, giving facility managers a near-real-time picture of how water is being used.
AI then helps identify unusual patterns.
For instance, a restroom might typically see heavy water use during office hours and almost none overnight. If the system detects a steady flow at 2 am, it can flag the anomaly for investigation. The cause could be a running toilet or a leaking valve that might otherwise go unnoticed for weeks.
Unlike a monthly water bill, which reveals consumption after the fact, this system helps teams identify potential problems sooner.
WaterOS uses smart sensors and real-time monitoring to help commercial buildings detect leaks and track water consumption.
The technical team explains that WaterOS learns normal consumption patterns based on factors such as time of day, occupancy and seasonal variation. It can then flag deviations for facility managers to investigate.
This makes it easier to move from reacting to a problem after water has been wasted to identifying it earlier.
2. EcoVapure: Recovering water from cooling towers
Some of the biggest water losses in commercial buildings happen where occupants rarely look.
Cooling towers, used in offices, factories and data centres, remove heat by allowing water to evaporate. While this is an essential part of the cooling process, it also means water is continuously lost. Cooling towers also lose water when some is drained away (blowdown) or carried away as tiny droplets (drift), although evaporation is often the largest source.
EarthFokus developed EcoVapure to recover some of that water.
Its deployed technology, called Capture, is designed for cooling towers that produce a visible plume of water vapour. As the plume passes over a specially designed surface, droplets gather and grow until they fall back into the cooling system. The recovered water can also be collected separately for other uses.
The company says the technology can recover roughly 30% of evaporation loss under relevant operating conditions, though the actual amount depends on the tower and its operating environment.
EcoVapure captures water droplets from cooling tower plumes, helping buildings recover a portion of the water otherwise lost through evaporation.
EarthFokus is also developing Convert, a second approach intended to recover water from cooling towers without visible plumes.
For Rishi, the opportunity extends beyond individual buildings. Cooling towers are used across industries, including power generation and data centres, making water recovery a potential way to address losses in essential infrastructure.
3. WaterFokus: Saving water without changing habits
WaterFokus focuses on reducing water use at the tap.
Its fixtures and aerators control the flow of water while maintaining the feel of a strong stream. “Aerators do this by mixing air into the water as it exits the tap, while other low-flow fixtures use restrictors or specially designed nozzles,” adds Siva T from the cooling towers tech team.
The difference may be barely noticeable while washing your hands. But across hundreds or thousands of taps used repeatedly throughout the day, even small reductions can add up.
The idea is to make conservation almost effortless: install the fixture, and less water is used without asking people to change their routines.
WaterFokus aerators reduce water flow while maintaining a comfortable stream, helping save water without changing everyday habits.
EarthFokus also manufactures its fixtures in metal, with durability in mind, rather than relying on plastic products that may need frequent replacement.
Together, the three solutions address different aspects of water management: WaterOS helps buildings understand where water is going, EcoVapure recovers some of what is lost, and WaterFokus reduces consumption at the source.
How tracking water helped a building spot wastage
One of EarthFokus’s clients is WeWork India, which previously relied on manual readings to track water consumption across its centres. The process was labour-intensive, and the data often arrived too late to help facility teams identify unusual patterns quickly.
With IoT-based metering, WeWork now has a more continuous picture of its water use.
“The biggest shift has been moving from estimated, manual figures to accurate, real-time data across every asset,” says P. Seshashayan, Manager, Energy & Sustainability, WeWork India Management Ltd.
According to the company, consumption fell from 45 litres per person per day to 29 litres. WeWork has set a target of reaching 20 litres per person per day by FY28.
WeWork’s team says real-time monitoring has also helped it identify unusual consumption patterns sooner and strengthen sustainability reporting. It is currently evaluating EarthFokus’s aerators and considering water audits, but has not deployed EcoVapure.
For Rishi, the impact becomes especially meaningful when he can put the numbers into perspective.
EarthFokus combines smart monitoring, water recovery and low-flow fixtures to tackle water wastage across commercial buildings.
“I’ve spent multiple interactions with clients visualising this five-billion-litre number,” he says. He recalls thinking about how that volume could have helped cities facing water shortages, including Bengaluru during its recent water crisis.
For him, the number represents both a milestone and an opportunity to do more. EarthFokus is exploring how cooling-tower recovery could add significantly to its savings as the technology scales.
The company has also worked with IBM and Cognizant. Rishi recalls that introducing water-saving fixtures at Cognizant’s Chennai operations helped cut daily water demand by nearly 80%, according to the company’s account of the intervention.
These experiences have reinforced an important lesson for the founders: measuring water use is only the beginning. The next step is to make changes, verify their impact and keep improving.
How the startup plans to save even more water
EarthFokus typically begins working with a building by assessing its water infrastructure and establishing a baseline for consumption. It then identifies potential reductions and introduces monitoring or other interventions, allowing facility teams to track progress.
The approach also reflects a practical understanding of what encourages businesses to invest in conservation. Alongside environmental impact, solutions need to improve operational efficiency and deliver measurable results.
From a single tap to more than 130 commercial buildings, EarthFokus’s solutions have helped save over five billion litres of water.
Looking ahead, EarthFokus wants to expand EcoVapure and develop a water-recovery technology that can be adopted in India and scaled internationally.
For Rishi, however, the underlying problem remains simple. Whether it is a tap, a reverse-osmosis system or a cooling tower, we often use more water than we actually need.
“The basic problem is that we end up using more than what we need because we take water for granted,” he says.
For him, conserving water begins with understanding where the water we already have is going and finding ways to prevent it from being wasted.
All images courtesy of EarthFokus team
