This year, nearly everyone is talking about water.
But for Christopher Peacock, CEO and co-founder of Aquaoso Technologies PBC, water has been the topic of conversation for more than two decades.
The Folsom technology company built a geospatial data platform that helps guide decisions about water risk.
“Unfortunately, our software can’t solve the problem of creating more water,” Peacock said. “The goal now is how do we manage what water is available to us.”
Most of their customers work with agriculture, and include agriculture lenders, investors and food suppliers. The company’s software pulls together multiple data sources to create a profile on the availability of water in areas or individual properties. Properties are assigned a water security score, which Peacock compares to a credit score, that agriculture lenders and farmers can use to make decisions about risk, how to value that property and how to use that property.
Last year it launched in four new states, and now covers California, Idaho, Montana, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado and Kansas.
Peacock said California's years of droughts over the last decade are starting to raise awareness among lenders and investors about the potential financial impacts of water on land value and farming operations.
“Now with drought on everybody’s mind, we are seeing food supply companies, banks, investors, coming to us,” Peacock said.
At the beginning of last year, the company had six employees. Since then, it’s worked on expanding into new states and continued building on its analytics platform. Now it has 16 full-time employees. In February, it completed a $2 million seed funding round led by Nashville, Tennessee-based Otter Creek Investments.
However, Peacock said his biggest sign of success is that Aquaoso's first customers remain its customers to this day.
One of those is AgriFinancial, a nationwide agriculture lender.
“They’ve increased their relevance in our business tenfold since they started,” said Joshua Ollenberger, an AgriFinancial regional sales officer covering California. Ollenberger uses the Aquaoso report to value properties in their use as collateral.
“Customers would take a week to pull together all the data that’s pulled together on one Aquaoso report,” Ollenberger said.
Putting together a comprehensive picture of the water resources on a piece of property requires data from Sustainable Groundwater Management Act agencies, water districts and other federal, state and local governmental agencies. None of it is available in the same place.
“I can’t go down for every deal to whichever county’s office and pull docs,” Ollenberger said. “I wouldn’t be able to get any business done.”
Ollenberger said the growers he works with also appreciate the report, since it means there won’t be any surprises when they’re not able to borrow as much against a property that’s more water insecure.
“It actually benefits the farmer because we were able to have those conversations early on, and not scrambling to make ends meet,” he said.
Ollenberger said that over the years, Aquaoso has listened to feedback to make its reports even more comprehensive.
“As a company to work with, since the beginning, they’ve been really focused on customers' needs,” he said.
When Peacock first started the company in 2016, he envisioned it as a platform to build water markets — a market where buyers and sellers can trade rights to water.
“I do think that water markets are a major opportunity for California and other states, and we will see more of them over the next few years,” Peacock said.
At the time, however, he said the state wasn’t ready for widespread water markets.
Although Peacock recently relocated to Denver, the company, whose employees largely work remotely, is still headquartered in Folsom.
“The Sacramento region has been really important to us as a company, as we’ve scaled the business,” he said.
The company launched using a bootstrapping model, but along the way received funding from local angel investor Mark Haney, and other Sacramento investors.
In 2018, the company pivoted to its current focus on collecting different data around water and putting it together, sometimes for the first time.
“Because the data is in silos, the decisions have been made in silos,” Peacock said.
His hope is that bringing the disparate scraps of information about wells, groundwater and surface water together into one place can lead to more holistic decisions about land use.
“The decisions and discussions around water management have been fragmented in and of themselves,” he said.
Peacock said the company is now working with financial institutions to build financial tools that could incentivize regenerative agriculture and other water-saving practices.
“Helping organizations understand those financial impacts will help change the behavior of people over time,” Peacock said.
Peacock said the company’s goal is to expand its impact as far as possible.
“Our ultimate vision of Aquaoso is to have a water security score on every piece of property around the world for every industry that has water as a component in the supply chain,” Peacock said.
The Essentials
Aquaoso Technologies PBC
Founders: Christopher Peacock, CEO, Cameron Burford, head of growth
Founded: 2016
Employees: 16
