Saya Life: Intelligent Water Management for you

In the age where climate change dominates the headlines, energy conservation is something many companies are working towards. But the number remains small when it comes to companies that are looking at water conservation. Water conservation plays a big part in the overall climate change issue and yet few see it. Saya Life, a company based out of Los Angeles, California has a different stance on this. Founded in 2016 by Sanjay Poojary, Saya Life is trying to change how water is used in daily life and its impact is growing with each passing year.

We caught up with Sanjay Poojary, the Founder and CEO, to know more about Saya Life.

What motivated you to come up with an innovative concept like Saya Life?

In the last 18+years, I have worked in small start-ups to large enterprise like Cisco Systems building IoT solutions. The solution was highly technical and exciting but none of these solutions solved what I thought to be big issues like management of basic needs like water, electricity, and gas. I was interested in creating technologies that would help with the conservation and management of water, energy and perhaps also designing disaster management kits. The original idea was to be able to handle all these things remotely.

SAYA’s first solution was built around water because it is something we overlook in the United States. Every year, trillions of gallons of water is wasted. Although there is a big push for energy conservation, we don’t realize how much energy is wasted just moving water from one place to another. So, our IoT solution is focused on changing this by basing our service around creating awareness by providing meaningful water related data to our consumers on a mobile device or a dashboard screen. Our technology helps you conserve water and prevent damages caused due to a catastrophic water leak. Moreover, we collect a lot of data from homes and use machine learning and predictive algorithms on the collected data. The utility companies can thus get feedback from us on how the water is being used once it enters homes from their network so that they can manage the water needs for the future.

Did you have a lot of support when you were starting out?

When I started out I had no idea how I’d get the ball rolling. I quit my day job and started full-time working on this venture in late 2016. We were selected as a portfolio company at LACI, which is an LA-based cleantech incubator. That’s where we got a lot of support from advisors, business experts and found a path to the market. The mayor of Los Angeles was also very supportive and further, LADWP was also very encouraging to pilot our solutions. All this has helped us scale and get the necessary certifications and take our solution to the market with great vigor.

Your offerings are exciting. Could you tell us about them?

SAYA has built a Smart water management solution which includes hardware, software and cloud components. Our ultrasonic water meter is very accurate and can pick up on the smallest of leaks. Be it slab leaks or something that’s happening in the pipes for a long duration of time. With our technology, we can monitor the water consumption within a location down to the second. Our flood sensors detect appliance leaks and can send signal to our smart meter to shut off the valve and prevent expensive damages. We have a mobile app and a dashboard that basically makes all these devices talk to people. They give people critical feedback when something is wrong. For example, when a family is out, there is no way to know if the house is flooding. But with our technology, you have the option to automatically shut off a valve or send a notification to the property manager so that they can do something about it right away.

We have a smart gateway that uses radio technology which can go over a couple miles. The gateway can also talk to multiple water meters that can be deployed in a large community for submetering applications. These gateways can even talk to gas, air quality sensors, energy sensors and so much more.

How are your offerings different from your competitors?

SAYA has the only complete water management solution in the market that can be used for both submetering application and also for comprehensive water risk prevention which includes pin hole leaks, pipe bursts and appliance leaks. Saya has a modular technology that can scale into water, energy and air quality management. Something we will be releasing soon.

 So, what’s next for Saya Life?

We are a startup, so, we are looking to scale and grow over the next couple of years. Once, we do that we want to move into larger and bigger applications. We would like to integrate into smart grids eventually, for city wide deployments. Saya Life is all about building life solutions.

Life Solutions connoisseur

Sanjay Poojary, Founder and CEO of Saya Life

Mr. Poojary has been a senior technology leader with extensive experience in directing, managing and delivering solutions for almost two decades now. He’s worked with Cisco at the capacity of a Senior Manager of Software Engineering QA.

He has a B.S from the Manipal Institute of Technology and an M.S in Computer Science from Cal State Fullerton. He is multi-lingual with a great handle on Hindi, Gujarati, and English. He also has a basic understanding of Mandarin and Thai.

“We plan to roll out a comprehensive building management solution in the near future.”

"Saya Life is all about building life solutions."