In this BlueTech Forum interview, WaterWorld editor Angela Godwin talks with Trevor Hill, Chairman and CEO of Fathom, about the company’s evolution and the broader water industry. Hill explains that Fathom originated inside a regulated water utility that was an early adopter of hourly automated meter reading (AMI) technology. Frustrated by the lack of a platform to turn the massive data stream into actionable insights, the team built their own system, commercialized it in 2008, and spun it out as an independent, VC‑backed company in 2013. Hill then discusses the shift from a supply‑side, dam‑and‑pipeline‑focused paradigm to demand‑side management, arguing that real‑time water usage data, price signals, and peer comparison can dramatically reduce consumption and alleviate infrastructure pressure. He highlights how smart water data can improve customer engagement, enable users to monitor their own use, and allow utilities to make real‑time operational adjustments—optimizing pressures, temperatures, and quality—to cut power and chemical costs and extend asset life. The interview underscores the untapped value of water data and the potential for data‑driven solutions to address the looming water scarcity and infrastructure challenges.
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Hi, I'm Angela Godwin with Waterworld and Industrial Waterworld magazines. Coming to you from the BlueTech Forum in San Francisco, California. Joining me today is Trevor Hill of Fathom. Trevor, thank you so much for being with us.
Thank you.
Really appreciate it. Well, before we jump into the questions, because I do have a few lined up for you. I've always been fascinated by Fathom. It has a really interesting backstory. And if you could share just briefly with the viewers, where did Fathom come from?
Sure. Well, Fathom was created in our regulated water utility company. We aggregated utilities and we were early adopters of AMI meters, meters that read every hour. And what we found was that there wasn't a good platform to take that data and make it useful through the billing back office vertical.
Right.
So out of frustration, we built our own platform to do that, to give our customers real time access to information and to tease out the value propositions of big data in water, which we knew as utility owners.
Right.
And we commercialized that platform in 08, actually right after the downturn, and then spun it out of our regulated entity in 2013, which is a pub, which was a public entity.
Wow.
And so now it's VC funded and growing rapidly and has its roots in regulated utility operations, which is just, it's just fascinating.
I love that story. So now let me ask you, demand side management, what is the benefit there? Where is that headed, do you think?
Yeah. So we live in a culture. If you go back to, you know, Roman times or whatever, the whole water industry was built around an abundance of water. So we live in a, I like to say a supply side dominated paradigm. It was always big dams and taking water from the rivers and, you know, unlimited quantity. And so everything has been designed around that. But now the expense of supply side is astronomical. Reverse osmosis or there's not going to be more dams built. There's really a decreasing volume of water. And yet we've done very little on the demand side, which is understanding what happens to water when it gets into our distribution system and giving customers the chance to understand how much water they're using vis a vis their own consumption or their neighbors or whatever. So the whole demand side means that we're looking at the data now as opposed to just giving people as much water as they could use and charging them a really small amount of money. Now we're going to look at the way water is used in the whole distribution system and in every home and give customers real time access to that information. What we see and What I think will happen, undoubtedly is that as people become more familiar with water, what they do use, and as price signals modify their behavior or peer pressure, you know, you're using more water than your neighbor, then suddenly we'll know where the water is and we'll start to use, I think, a lot less of it. And as that happens, of course we don't need as much on the supply side. So in my mind, the crisis that's evolving around the world will be solved primarily on the demand side. Knowing where our water is and using.
It more thoughtfully, that seems to make perfect sense.
It's much cheaper.
So when we talk about smart water, smart water management, do you think that it often goes overlooked? I mean, even when we're talking about smart cities? And if it is, how do we address that?
I do think it's a bit overlooked. I don't think people realize yet the value of the data and water or just how much we don't know about what's happening in our utilities. And so you think about how much data we have in terms of other businesses, banks, airlines and Google and Apple and whatever. If you applied some of those same philosophies to water, not only would customer engagement become much, much better, customers would take carriage of their own activity with the utility and go online, manage their accounts themselves and things like that. But also on the operation side, you can imagine that if you knew where your water was exactly, and all, for example, the system pressures to your whole system, or temperatures or quality, then you could make real time adjustments to the system to drive power costs down, chemical costs down, make the infrastructure last longer. People talk about the trillion dollars that needs to be spent on infrastructure, but in my mind what's more likely to happen is a week out, another 10 or 20 years of using this infrastructure, but more gently as a function of using the data that we have to make those systems more responsive and less rigid from a operations perspective.
Right, well, that makes perfect sense.
Yeah, yeah, I think. And so we built a whole business around that and we're starting to see amazing value propositions emerging from better understanding of the data in water.
That is fantastic, Trevor. Well, we wish you all the best going forward and we'll keep an eye on it and hope to catch up with you again sometime in the future.
I'd love to.
Thank you very much for joining us. We really appreciate it.
