This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with RJ Pire, founder of Service ID in Fitchburg.
Pire’s startup company has an AI-based platform for identifying lead pipes, which is meant to help water utilities find and remove these pipes “faster and cheaper,” Pire said.
“They’re saddled with some new regulations as a direct result of Flint, Michigan, and they’re in a position where they have to re-think how they’ve done things in the past,” he said.
That includes creating an inventory of all of their service lines, which are pipes that connect homes to the water main. Part or all of those lines are traditionally owned by the property owner, and utilities generally haven’t kept track of them as a result, according to Pire.
“Now they’re in a position where they have to go back and identify what all of those are made of, and it’s really expensive to send somebody into each individual property to do that,” he said. “So we’ve developed a tool that, with a simple photo taken by a smartphone, will identify the material type and track that all back directly into an inventory for the utility.”
It’s able to identify the pipe materials using a computer vision model and machine learning program that was trained on a large data set of service line images, Pire explains. The AI tool looks for key visual features that indicate the presence of lead, from the shape of the pipe joint to the color and other characteristics.
“I like to believe we probably have more images of service lines than anyone in the world at this point,” he said.
The company has completed a pilot with the Verona Water Utility for the Service ID platform, demonstrating it could identify lead pipes with greater than 95% accuracy. Pire said he’s “really happy” with how it’s working given the early stage of the company, noting it “will continue to get better with each image that we add to it.”
Ultimately, the company aims to help utilities “empower the homeowners to do the inventory for them” by using the web interface to upload photos of their pipes, Pire said.
He plans to raise investment funding in the second or third quarter of this year, as the company prepares its second phase of pilot projects with as many as 10 utilities participating.
Service ID was the runner-up in the Water Council’s fall Tech Challenge. See more in a recent story on the contest.
Listen to the podcast below, sponsored by UW-Madison:
