WaterBit

About WaterBit

WaterBit, Inc. was a precision agriculture company founded in 2015 by Manu Pillai and Leif Chastaine, operating from San Jose, California. Pillai's motivation stemmed from his childhood experiences with severe drought in Nigeria and water quality issues in India, which drove him to develop a sensor-based solution to address global water scarcity in food production. The company focused on the agricultural technology market, providing an Autonomous Irrigation Solution (AIS) for growers of specialty crops like nuts, grapes, and vegetables. WaterBit's business model revolved around selling a comprehensive package of hardware and cloud-based software to enable farmers to remotely monitor and control irrigation with high precision.

The company's core offering was an integrated system designed to optimize water usage, reduce labor costs, and improve crop yield and consistency. This system featured several components: the WaterBit Carbon, a small, solar-powered IoT node that connected to various sensors in the field; a Block Valve Controller that automated the opening and closing of irrigation valves; and the WaterBit Connect gateway, which used long-range radio (LoRa) to transmit data from the field to the cloud. Farmers accessed this data and controlled their irrigation systems through a web-based Dashboard, available on computers and smartphones. This setup allowed for managing irrigation at a "microblock" level, taking into account granular data on soil moisture, weather, and plant stage. By automating a traditionally labor-intensive process, the solution aimed to provide a return on investment in under two years through gains in yield and efficiencies in water and labor.

A significant milestone was the securing of an $11.4 million Series A funding round in June 2018, led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from notable investors like TJ Rodgers, the former CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. This capital was intended to accelerate product development towards fully autonomous irrigation and expand sales and marketing efforts. In 2017, Andrew Wright, a former executive at Cypress Semiconductor, was recruited as CEO to scale the company. However, according to PitchBook data, WaterBit ceased operations around April 2022.