Rethinking Compliance: Faster, Smarter Metals Testing for Safer Water
As utilities brace for customer requests, regulatory pressure, and aging infrastructure, waiting weeks for a single ICP lab result can turn urgent decisions into costly delays.
In this episode of Liquid Assets, host Ravi Kurani sits down with Jose Robert Castro, founder and CEO of Segura, to unpack how rapid diagnostics complement (not replace) lab confirmation, where multi-analyte testing pays off first—Lead & Copper Rule triage, treatment optimization, remote mining, beverage networks—and what validation and manufacturing at scale will take to make field diagnostics the new default.
What You'll Hear in This Episode:
- The lab backlog problem: why 2–6 week turnarounds stall responses—and how <5-minute on-site results close the action gap
- Multi-metal in one run: practical advantages of testing lead, copper, arsenic (and more) together for utility workflows
- Lead & Copper Rule triage: fast customer-side screening while keeping labs as the gold standard for compliance
- Process optimization: verify arsenic removal and track iron/copper impacts before and after treatment steps
- Industrial deployments: remote mining compliance and beverage plants with dozens to hundreds of abstraction points
- Digital by default: app-managed testing, API integrations, and data that flows into existing dashboards and CMMS
- Scaling & trust: WHO/EPA method validation, volume manufacturing, and partnerships that bring tools to small and mid-size utilities
Listen On:
📺 Watch the Interview
Meet Jose Castro
Jose Castro is the CEO and founder of Segura, an Oxford-based startup bringing glucometer-style electrochemistry to water quality. Raised in Guatemala City, he saw firsthand how intermittent service shapes daily life and safety, later pursuing analytical chemistry and work on continuous glucose monitors before focusing his Oxford studies on water management.
Today, Jose partners with utilities and industrial operators to make fast, multi-metal, API-connected testing a practical first step: triage in minutes, then confirm with the lab—so teams can act with confidence and keep water flowing.
Transcript
00:00
Ravi Kurani
This episode of Liquid Assets is sponsored by HASA, the leader in water treatment solutions. HASA delivers eco friendly, reliable and cost effective water care and has been keeping communities safe one drop at a time. They've been at it for more than 60 years and you can learn more about HASA by visiting hasa.com.
00:25
Jose Castro
Hi everyone, my name is Jose and I am the CEO and founder of Segura. Segura enables anyone anywhere to test for key priority contaminants in water like ILED and arsenic in under five minutes. It's fast, it's affordable, it's easy to use and it's all managed through a digital interface.
00:39
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to Liquid Assets, a podcast where we talk about water and its intersection through the world and the lens of business, management and technology. I'm your host, Ravi Kurani and today we have an awesome guest for you. Jose Roberto from Segura. Jose, how are you doing today?
00:56
Jose Castro
Great. Living the dream, cannot complain.
00:59
Ravi Kurani
You're calling in from where in the world?
01:02
Jose Castro
I am in Oxford today. I'm usually on the road but I spent the past three years here in Oxford in the uk.
01:11
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. Really, really cool. I want to jump into a topic were talking about right before I hit record and you grew up in Guatemala. You were talking about how you believe in market solutions for kind of solving the world's problems. And you had a really interesting story about how you actually used to treat your own water. Take it, you know, pick it up. Can you just walk the audience through what you were telling me and your worldview on that?
01:42
Jose Castro
Yeah, well, yeah, for context, yeah, I grew up in Guatemala in the city. I've been lived india as well for a couple years. And yeah, I mean I wouldn't call myself the most neoliberal, pro market person out there, but I think a lot of the problem and bigger reason why foreign air and the water and development kind of industry, so to call it, has not achieved its goals after maybe trillions of dollars spent by now and decades of work is by being so top down and not being very market driven or not really putting financial sustainability at the heart of it. And I think that's something that right now there's so much chaos going on with USAID cuts. Well, even before last year I think there was already some big changes going on in that industry.
02:40
Jose Castro
You see UN agencies having to go and fundraise from philanthropy for example. And I think that lack of focus on financial sustainability more than just market, but you know, really just make sure you get good cash flow and that you're able to cover your operations and have a little more. That's never been like the way things are done. And I think philanthropy should have been or should be seen as, you know, similar to startup. You know, some pre seed funding to get you to the point that you can be, you know, financially sustainable and even grow. But the way it's been done, it's continue to get a project, get funded, but not the goal is never actually been to reach financial sustainability. I think there are some efforts that are changing that.
03:27
Jose Castro
The work that some people at Oxford do that's related to that in strengthening the institutions on the ground themselves to become viable businesses. But overall the industry as a whole doesn't fully operate that way.
03:41
Ravi Kurani
Kind of dig into that really quick. If you were to change the system, right. And whether that's removing philanthropy from the conversation or just potentially changing the coordinate system of how businesses, government people view that. I'm not trying to seed anything but like how would you structure it? Like what would it look like in, in Jose's world?
04:07
Jose Castro
Yeah, I think there's definitely a role for philanthropy, especially in places where there's no sufficient local government funding or where just given the geographical landscape and the urban density just doesn't make sense for centralized supplies to exist. Well, yeah, my perspective is the external funding should only be as an aid to get to be a self sustained operation which needs to consider alternative ways of generating revenue. I think maybe in the past that was harder, but now you get Blue Credits, some people, even to some crypto, there's a lot of other things out there. Maybe I'm saying all this from a very privileged position, but overall I think today there's a lot more options for generating financially sustainable operations than there was before. Access to Internet was sort of merchandised for sure.
05:28
Ravi Kurani
I think that's actually a really interesting topic and one that we haven't covered on the podcast before. You jumped a little bit into Blue Credits and crypto. Do you have a few quick bullet points of other revenue generating streams that water can use?
05:51
Jose Castro
I think the Blue credit economy or just same as Carbon Credit are still, well, carbon credits of course much further along and they have also not fulfilled their mission for the most part. I think Blue Credit have seen some success like from voluntary carbon markets for water, for example. It seems like it's been a stretch the kind of narrative that you have to you replace carbon because now you use these filters as opposed to burning Wood and that gives you some credits and that's how you fund operations. It's. It seems a little crazy that sometimes that's the kind of like jumps you have to get the funding. But that's one I know there are people like working at the intersection of water infrastructure and blockchain and yeah like biodiversity credits as well. So I think there's new things coming up in financing.
06:47
Jose Castro
Maybe not my topic of full expertise.
06:52
Ravi Kurani
Sure, sure. Makes sense. Really cool. Let's jump over to Segura. We started off with your story in Guatemala. You have a really interesting story. I won't spoil too much for the audience because I'd love to hear it from you, but walk us through. Let's jump into Segura first. Let's talk about kind of what you guys do and then I'd love to after that rewind the tape and figure out the intent or kind of the origination story of how it started.
07:21
Jose Castro
Yeah, yeah. So briefly, Sigurd is an Oxford based water quality monitoring startup. We leverage the same technology that's used in glucometers. So you know where you pinch your finger and you get a number that applied for water monitoring applications. We have, you know, found some space in like drinking water utilities, particularly in use cases where sending samples to the lab, it's either too expensive or just doesn't make sense Things for example, lead testing for lead and copy rule compliance in the US we just finished a four month proof of concept within your Department of Environmental Protection looking specifically at that. And we have found a few other kind of similar use cases in which it's much preferred to do it on site.
08:13
Jose Castro
Some application and process optimization for example that we're going to be exploring looking at arsenic removal but also an iron and copper testing for water treatment. Iron and copper in high concentrations can affect filtration for pools. As you know better than I do. But sometimes people send it to the lab because there's not good tools to measure that on site. But with this we're able to get a recommendation for treatment or replacement of a filter way quicker. And mining is another thing. Some food and beverage, a lot of places where you know, sending, where traditional lab infrastructure is, if it exists, hard to reach. We've seen some good interest. I think that's an avenue we're really trying to get to.
09:04
Jose Castro
You know, like north of Mexico for example, with all the food and beverage companies that export to the U.S. we've been talking to some South African like regional hubs that produce beverages that then get exported to the rest of the region. Of course, in Central America as well. Yeah, there's a lot of places in which sending samples to the lab is the least optimal option.
09:29
Ravi Kurani
So I want to deconstruct that for the audience a little bit. We have folks that actually listen to the podcasts that are not in the world of water. And so there's a few things I want to backtrack on. You had mentioned lead testing for the nydp. We see stories on lead a lot. How, like if you were explaining this to me as a five year old, like, why. Let's just go back to the basics, right? Like why is lead bad and where is lead found? You know, people are like, oh, every single pipe has lead inside there and they see this Flint, Michigan problem. Yeah, like walk us through just the basics of what is lead and why is lead bad and like how prevalent is it?
10:15
Jose Castro
Yeah, so yeah, lead is a known neurotoxin. It's particularly bad for children and women. It gets stored in bones, actually. So when you're this pregnant woman and there's a baby being formed, the lead that gets stored in the bones actually gets released and forms the skeleton of the baby. But then that actually affects brain development and it's been linked to a lot of behavioral issues, disease and yeah, it has had a lot of historical impacts. Actually. Some people claim that the fall of the Roman Empire is due to lead contamination on the vessels that used to be used for keeping the wine. That led to a lot of behavioral issues and health issues. Yeah, I don't know exactly, you know, how that has been tested, that theory, but I think there's some, you know, something there in terms of the prevalence.
11:15
Jose Castro
I think that's actually the problem. We don't fully know. You know, we know it's there for historical reason. In the US it was, you know, banned in the 80s, in the UK in the 70s. So it used to be construction material that's, you know, really cheap to use because it's very malleable. So it's very, you know, cheaper than copper or you know, other materials to make plumbing material. But in other places where maybe we hadn't thought about it so much is, you know, where there, it's pumps, like hand pumps, they recently, in the past five, 10 years have also been found to have lead exceedances.
11:56
Jose Castro
You know, there's some research in a number of African countries finding 80% of the pumps having excellent levels of lead So I think it's a more widespread problem that we realize there's a lot of medical evidence that show that it's really bad and we're just gathering pieces to realize that it's actually probably more prevalent than we even think.
12:20
Ravi Kurani
And what is NYDP or just any sort of regulatory body currently doing? You had mentioned that sending a sample to the lab. Let's deconstruct that really quick. Like what's happening? Like why do people send. You obviously make an in situ testing device. And so what's currently happening today?
12:40
Jose Castro
Yeah, so New York, unlike many cities around the US and around the world, they have, you know, done their part and replaced their own infrastructure throughout the years to remove the lead. But there still remains on the private side, it's usually called. So you know, there will be a big pipe from the utility, but then the connection to the house down is actually made out of lead or some walls, some parts in the wall still are made out of lead. That's usually where the issues are. And you know, there will be some reason why a customer will request a test, maybe some discoloration or it was in the news. So then they got worried. By law, in the US as a utility, if someone requests, you're obligated to send and do a sample.
13:34
Jose Castro
But currently the only method they have is they have to send a sampler. The sampler follows a standard protocol and then ship them all the way back to the lab. And then in the lab they use this half a million dollar machine that's the size of a fridge to produce a test. Takes them anywhere between two to six weeks to produce a single data point. Cost them around 120, upwards of $200 when you account for all the logistics, all the labor, all the consumables. But the idea is that with this they're actually able to respond to this customer complaints and customer concerns a lot quicker and identify.
14:13
Jose Castro
Not because you only are able to do a few samples that you send to the lab with this, you know, you can test 3, 4, 5 taps if you will, very quickly on the same kind of moment. So that actually gives you an idea of where the lead is coming from, which then allows you then to find a solution. But yeah, it's, you know, this is really a tool for the water manager, so to speak. I think maybe that's one clarification that I often do that, you know, this doesn't solve the problem right away. Like, you know, the lead's still going to be there, but for the people that are dealing with the water and managing, having a tool like this gives them a lot more control and reduces their cost on testing very significantly.
14:56
Ravi Kurani
So let's draw a comparison really quick. You had mentioned it takes about one and a half to two weeks. And there's this half a million dollar machine that somebody would have to have put in the capital expenditure to buy that. What's the cost per test and time and not even considering the fact that you have to actually take a sample and mail it or send it somehow to this laboratory. What does that look like between Segura and what's currently happening?
15:21
Jose Castro
Yeah, the. Actually I have a slide here. Let me see what we said. We got some numbers from them. If you include the whole, all of the steps, it includes 7 to 8 people, 8 to 9 people. Sorry. Taking up to 6 weeks cost per sample being from 1225 to almost $560 with Sigurd involves 1 to 2 results in less than 5 minutes. Costing again with labor and everything included, 25 to $60. So can save upwards of even 90% non direct costs. But also I think there's a lot of savings as well in the fines that you could potentially get as a utility if you do find lead. If I'm my, I'm not sure I'm remembering this correctly, but I think a fine can be like $25,000 a day for some of these known issues.
16:26
Jose Castro
So if it takes you six weeks to realize that you're in a really bad position, but if you know right away that you're above 50 BPV or 15 depending on where you are, then you're actually able to get to a solution much quicker and avoid those fines.
16:41
Ravi Kurani
Let's jump to your other markets you had mentioned arsenic, iron, copper, mining, food and beverage. I think the drinking water piece I understand decently well off of your explanation. How does this translate over to these other markets and what's happening there?
16:59
Jose Castro
Yeah, let's start with mining. I think that one's one that was kind of randomly inbound. Somebody heard, you know that we can measure like multiple metals on site very accurately. And then they asked us, hey, can you measure high copper, the parts per million in this type of samples? And the answer is we probably can. We're still kind of in the process of validating some data there. But the problem they're facing there is they have to do a lot of monitoring for environmental compliance reasons. They're mandated to make sure that the water on their sites is not leaching onto water bodies that people use for recreation or for drinking water. So they spend a lot of money on testing. And a lot of these sites are of course very remote.
17:50
Jose Castro
So they have spent a lot of money on getting infrastructure to be able to test. So they would sometimes set up labs in these remote places, which cost them tons of money. They have also this one customer identity specifically. They have spent millions and thousands of hours working on different inline monitoring that are kind of ideal for this application, but have not been able to fully solve the problem. So this is kind of given an option to still be able to produce in situ data very quickly with a lot of extra control over the chemistry. I think that's the advantage with this. You can spike your samples, you can run blanks with the inline monitor. It's a little more autonomous, so you don't have as much control.
18:35
Jose Castro
But if you have a trained operator, which these people normally are, then you actually have a lot of insight into is the process that we're running to treat the water working or not? Or is this just a fluke and you can always test before and after the process to actually see if there's a difference. And yeah, that's more on the process optimization kind of angle.
18:59
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, really cool. And how does this play in the food and beverage side?
19:05
Jose Castro
Similar situation. That's for an example. You know, I won't say the name of a company, but they have 130 abstraction points in their kind of Southern Africa regional hub. And you know, they produced beer and they, some of those sites receive municipal supplies, which they trust, but some of the other ones are groundwater or surface water. And you know, setting up 130 labs is, you know, it's just not possible. Like that would cost way too much money. So they do have some system to send samples from all those sites to a centralized lab, but it's once a week. And if they do have an issue of process that's not running well, or they did find some exceedances, it will always be too late.
19:54
Jose Castro
That's the problem with lab tests that even if it was two days or even a few hours, it's already too late if you're producing the errors and you have to be shipping every day. But yeah, that's the idea that they're actually able to test, you know, ten times a day. That's, that's kind of what we've been discussing on site very quickly as opposed to having to send samples to the lab.
20:16
Ravi Kurani
Really cool. I had an episode With Ruben Volmer, who is the CEO of Spout, they make a atmospheric generator for generating water. And he had a really interesting episode on heavy metals through the California fires. And so I think there, because, you know, as the pipes were melting or burning, there was a lot of particulates and pollutants that were going to the water stream. And he had actually brought up on the podcast that water testing obviously is so delayed that they just have a kind of do not drink or boil water advisory because it's just going to take like two weeks or two and a half weeks to really get the data. But then it's. The time has just passed. Right. You like the thing you should have acted on is two weeks ago.
21:01
Jose Castro
Yeah. No, lab testing is. I mean, it is the gold standard. Like, you know, I'm not saying this is going to replace it, but for a lot. I don't know if most, but a lot of use cases, it makes more sense to have something quicker. And then for confirmation or for compliance purpose, you send, you know, one compliance sample to the lab that doesn't. It's not as urgent. So I actually do think all these things go together. Lab testing, field tool, like inline monitors. I think having all of them, that's really like the powerful way of managing risk. But today we kind of only have labs for the most part.
21:32
Ravi Kurani
Really interesting. Jose. I want to rewind the tape then really quick and let's go back to the origin story. You can trace this back as far as you want. I love to see from entrepreneurs what in their upbringing, what their parents did, how they grew up, that started to take, you know, DNA into kind of what they're working on today. And so, yeah, you can rewind as far as you want. You can kind of jump. But I want to give you the agency to be able to like, tell us that story.
22:04
Jose Castro
Yeah, because, you know, when I was 10, I don't know, like, yeah, I grew up in my grandma's house and as you know, it's a very old house. And in Guatemala City, you don't. At least where she lives, you don't get 24, seven days a week water. You get five days a, you know, from like 4am to like 6pm so it's the time of the day that you have to fill up your water containers because, you know, otherwise you won't have water and you'll have to, you know, keep some for showering. And that's, you know, that was pretty normal for me. I then, you know, eventually Figured out that's actually not how it is everywhere in the world. Like some people actually have water on demand all the time.
22:51
Jose Castro
But yeah, we had to, you know, when these containers, we will add bleach to the containers, you know, a couple drops. I remember very vividly my grandma doing that. That's you know, supposed to be an emergency kind of measurement but for us, you know, that's what too. And yeah, I think it was shocking to have that realization a little bit that you know, I think it just that we just don't have water even in the capital. Well now my parents moved an apartment and it's a newer building and it has its own pump and all that. So now it's now we do have water. But like even like it's still like in my grandma's house, like it's still now 24 7, 365. So yeah, that's just the reality. And yeah, like fast forward to college. I studied chemistry.
23:45
Jose Castro
I studied chemistry in the US and have a, it's an ACS certified degree. And I was very focused on, you know, analytical chemistry and you know, measuring things. I was very interested and that I joined a professor working on a sensor where for things like PFAs unled and all blobs. And that's kind of how I first found water as a subject. But of course, you know, from very, from the technical side. But then you know, there was the sociology side, the business side, like the management. So I found it like extremely interesting because you know, you have to align all these things to craft a real solution. So I already had the water bug bit me after my second year of my undergrad I suppose. But yeah, when I graduated I actually joined a startup in LA.
24:41
Jose Castro
It was a biomedical startup making glucose monitors, especially CGMs like the ones that you put in your arm. So I'm very familiar with the commercial development of these decentralized technologies. Which vendors, which strategies, which IP strategies to use. Not from an academics perspective. How do you make sure that what you're doing can be scaled up to the place that the unique economics makes sense. And I think that's a hugely that has had a great impact on the way, you know, Segura has gone. Like today, you know, we're less than two years old but if someone tomorrow wanted to order 10,000 of these trips and you know, a thousand readers, we could do that.
25:20
Jose Castro
Like we have the capability and that's not trivial to achieve and that's Something that you know, we knew had to be nailed down from the beginning because you know in the lab you can do whatever but then can you actually produce that and make it like have the unit economics make sense? That's a challenge. And sell that takes years and millions to figure out. We were able to kind of work from the beginning with some contract manufacturers that were able to plug and play some pre existing solutions for us to bring this to market a lot quicker.
25:53
Jose Castro
And yeah, I think there have been some really great startups in the past that have created release great solutions that have actually solved the pain points but then never been able to scale to that point in which the unit economics make sense and the volumes make sense because of course the price per test are relatively low. You're talking less than lab testing, 10, $20 per test at most. So if you want to have a business that's going to be financially sustainable if not investable, then you need volume based agumin to do hundreds of thousands of tests. So that's part of the reason why we're so much focused on distribution at the moment. Like the tech is there but.
26:40
Ravi Kurani
Even.
26:40
Jose Castro
If it wasn't there it can be figured out that distribution is really the key part of the reason why in the fall went through the tech search Powered by Ecolab program trying to figure out what will a relationship of that nature take and would like to get to the point that you build this pipeline of distribution because direct sales are with some large clients like New York la that's fine, they're big contracts but the bulk of the demand is in the small medium clients that are hard to reach and that just type of funnel work. It's very expensive and you know, very hard to do like market entry. Yeah. Coming back to I guess I went to grad school to study water management. Well that's actually the reason why here in Oxford study water management.
27:37
Jose Castro
And we work very closely with a professor here that's also in the area of water quality and she works mostly in and like the development space. And you know, she also said that you know there's a really good application for this tool in those places where you know, labs are hard to get and even the one that you do get are also not the most reliable always. So you have something that you have a lot of control over the chemistry that's not a black box and that's fast and that's at the right price you can actually have a lot of impact for a lot of people. You know, for a lot of people that are Managing the water and then by extension by A lot of people are drinking the water. Yeah. After, after my degree I briefly worked in engineering consulting.
28:22
Jose Castro
Did a lot of, you know, project bidding and a lot of the optioneering work myself. So did also get some insight on how does a big business operate and if you want to actually get to those contracts, what do you have to do? So that's another huge thing that's been for Electron to play the game, which takes time and it's bureaucratic. In the uk there's five year admin cycles called apps. So right now it's the beginning of the new one. So if you want it to be used today, you're probably already two years too late. But yeah, I think we understand that piece that, you know, it's not this. There's a regulation, there's engineering consultants, there's utilities, and there you can have to play the game.
29:18
Ravi Kurani
Such an inspiring story. So if I, if I see the road correctly, you went from the story in Guatemala, growing up in your grandmother's home where you had to put chlorine drops and only got water, you know, five days a week studying chemistry, joined the glucose startup in la, and then you had this stint of kind of Oxford bridging in the gap. I totally see the glucose monitor startup, plus how Segura measures the water chemistry and then going through engineering consulting. So you actually understand the sales cycle, the process of how to actually get to the same customers that Sigura is getting in today.
29:55
Jose Castro
Yeah, I think maybe not just the sales, but actually the language. And I think that makes a huge difference. Like if you say lead pipes, that's not the same as saying that's 6 out of 10 lead service line, which is more of the language that's used in the industry that gives you more credibility if you say, you know, lead service line for inventory or galvanized lines requiring replacement. When you speak the same language, even though you know the two technologies can do the same, you probably go with the one that's, you know, actually specifically connecting the dots.
30:33
Ravi Kurani
Sure, yeah. When you look at parts in your path that got you to where you are. I want to rewind the tape again really quick. And where in there do you see like a big juncture that you took the turn that now got you to Segura, but there was like a fork in the road where you could have done something else. Like what was that time that comes to, that comes to mind right now?
31:04
Jose Castro
There's two answers the first one is that I, I had some visa issues and I couldn't, you know, continue my comfortable engineering job. I had to, well, you know, I had to stop doing that because of my decent regulation. That's just how the world is these days. So then like that was a good opportunity for me to like actually, you know, jump in, like test the wires I suppose on this idea that I had. And there was actually an investor at the time kind of just lined up very well. That was a friend of a friend, like, hey, we're launching this new kind of project for like climate solutions out of the Oxford ecosystem. If you had an idea like you should apply. And then we did and then we got it. So it was good timing there.
31:52
Jose Castro
But the other fork in the road earlier is that I actually went to boarding school india which is yeah, super random. But here I went to this international school, I got a scholarship and it was a very mission driven organization. There are people from all over the world called United World College and some people may know about it and yeah, I think that put me on this kind of change the world path and some, you know, the mission but also kind of the responsibility because you know, I got a lot of like responsibility, a lot of like scholarships. So I'm like, I got a scholarship for my undergrad, I got a scholarship for high school, organic scholarship for Oxford.
32:35
Jose Castro
And I do have some sense of, you know, like responsibility on that, you know, even like being an immigrant in the U.S. the capacity in which I was there is very different from like most Guatemalan. So I do have some, you know, sense of responsibility, just like a mission that you know, I'm supposed to be, not supposed to be. I am really driven to be working on solutions that can help a lot of people.
33:01
Ravi Kurani
If you look at the Segura now standing where you are with everywhere that you've come from. What does the next 10 years look like? Right now I want you to fast forward the tape. What does that look like?
33:18
Jose Castro
I think there are a couple milestones that we really want to hit. One of them become compliant methods. So certification with the who, the EPA and those I think the we already started working on because that will enable us to actually become a completely trusted solution. Right now there's chemistry, but again not aligned to the regulation yet. So I think that medium term, I don't like saying long term because that kind of always means never. But short, medium term become getting all the certifications so that if I have small utility, Guatemala wants to adopt a tool which actually some are. Then they will be able to. This is a WHO certified technology. So you can actually use it for this application and become the go to for this application. Really changed.
34:21
Jose Castro
Instead of people sending samples to the lab, knowing that these technologies exist and are more commonplace. I think that's really. And being the go to, of course, of the field monitoring. Of course there's a lot of incumbents, but we have a lot of like, we have technical advantages. We're the only one that's able to measure several metals at once. I think most of the things are very lead at once. And then copper, silver and test. Those are two tests. We do it in like one test, like many metals in one go, which is what people need to do anyway. And we're also pushing a lot for like digitization. Like everything is done through an app and API connected.
35:04
Jose Castro
And if you're already using some asset management software, if you're a big utility or a small one, I think there's been a lot of push on the industry to come. You know, do everything. Not pen and paper or Excel, but actually some smart dashboards. We are really interested in being very naturally integrated into that kind of workflow and at the same time being able to collect a lot of data. I think there's a lot of possibilities to integrate eventually with remote sensing, forecasting, things like that, to create very powerful data sets.
35:36
Ravi Kurani
I want touch on something before we close out the episode that you mentioned in the beginning. And you have a role and I've worked in the engineering consulting world. We wanted to kind of quickly talk about the role of engineering consultants in this entire process. Talk kind of me and the audience through what your thoughts were there, what the kind of problems are and how you see fixing it.
36:01
Jose Castro
Yeah, well, I think the first thing to note is that utilities, or us mostly public entities, are not engineering firms. Their job is literally to spend the money, not to design, not to build filters or do like that. That's where the engineering consulting firms and I think that's a, you know, a good thing. Like, you know, the utility, the government is kind of just administer the resources. But then the people with the degrees and with the knowledge, they're the ones that are kind offering the services to different. To different utilities. Like it wouldn't make sense for such specialized people to, you know, be stationed in one utility. I think it's good that's the way it is. But then obviously that adds another layer to procurement or just to the way solutions actually enter the market.
36:49
Jose Castro
Because, you know, if the engineer, that engineering consulting firm then proposes something to the utility, to the client. So if you go directly to the utility, which is, I think, what most startups would attempt, you're probably not in the right place. But then the drivers for engineering, for instance, are also different. They actually have, I think, somewhat of an incentive, not so much to innovate because they, you know, their trust and, you know, making sure they deliver what they need to deliver is more important than the risk of, you know, trying something new that, you know, they personally may like it and they trust it. I mean, no, it's good. But then without sufficient like, you know, proof of concept, it's too risky for them to, you know, propose something new and then risk the contracts or the reputation at the cost of that.
37:49
Jose Castro
But then that creates a bit of a cycle that, you know, there's no proof of concept because you're not pushing it. But then you're not pushing it because there's no proof of concept. So there's definitely some role there. For some, I would say they're very different. Like I've spoken with one, they're like, no, we just use standard methods because that's what the clients want. But some other ones are like, oh, that's cool. We're open to trying new things and send us some data, send us some equipment and see how we like it. Some are really like, they do innovation, but it's all in house. So I think they're different and even some of them have venture firms. I know Matt McDonald have a digital ventures fund that they look specifically at digital companies that are in the asset management or infrastructure space.
38:40
Jose Castro
So they're different, but I think it's just a matter of their incentives and the risk for them. There's too much risk and not that much incentive at the moment.
38:51
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, totally makes sense. I ask everybody this question before we sign off, Jose, and it's do you have a book, a movie or a TV show that has had like a profound impact on the way that you see the world?
39:10
Jose Castro
I don't know if people would know this. Well, maybe this book, but Susanov, Migration to the north, which is one of the most famous books from like the Arabic speaking world that have been translated into English from the Sudanese author. And I think it's mostly from my experience as an immigrant that's been kind of in Guatemala, but now in the UK and kind of across these two sides of the river. I think the experience there of the main character and the kind of antagonist have been very, you know, have been very instrumental in how I see the world. I think that's definitely one that comes to mind and I would recommend. It's a really fun book anyway. Like, it's very beautifully written and I think, yeah, everyone should read it. It's nice.
40:02
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. We'll find the link and throw it in the show notes. Jose, thanks a ton for joining us today.