Only in the utility industry do we run our most precious resource through pipes older than disco, but still tracks it all with paper logs, faded clipboards, and “Bob’s got it in his head.” You can’t make this up. But Chris Sosnowski didn’t laugh, he built Waterly.
Let’s not get it twisted. Waterly isn’t another SaaS play chasing the next shiny acronym. It’s a purpose-built platform designed with and for the real heroes behind the scenes, those “Water Superheroes” who make sure the taps run clean and the toilets flush like clockwork. They’re not logging data for fun, they’re holding the public health of North America together one flow rate at a time. Chris Sosnowski saw that analog chaos up close after three decades in water systems, ditched the spreadsheets, and put his entire civil engineering career (and then some) into digitizing a $5.8 billion market stuck in 1992.
And now? Waterly just locked in a $4 million Series A. Led by Burnt Island Ventures, with Tom Ferguson and Christine E. Boyle, PhD bringing heavyweight water game, and joined by Emerald Technology Ventures, backed by Clayton MacDougald, who knows the water value chain like some folks know NFL stats. Together, they’re throwing support behind a startup that’s already flowing through 1,000+ systems across 28 states and Canada, with 5,000 users logging millions of data points.
This isn’t about pretty dashboards. It’s about building a platform that speaks operator, not IT. Waterly’s SCADA-friendly, mobile-first system integrates with 90% of existing infrastructure and replaces those paper trails with real-time compliance data, asset tracking, sampling insights, and analytics that actually help people make decisions, not just print PDFs. And the pricing model? Based on average daily flow, not user seats. That’s how you win over budget-strapped municipalities and utility boards that still think “cloud” means weather.
And don’t sleep on the squad. Jason Vasquez, CTO and co-founder, brings the code while Chris Sosnowski brings the scars from building Concentric Integration before Waterly even had a name. Mike Murdy brought new muscle through the Persistent Controls acquisition. Mandy Sosnowski handles business ops, and Pete Nassos and Anders Hallsby from Mazarine Ventures aren’t just investors, they’re operators with decades in water tech who know exactly what it takes to scale this.
With this funding, Waterly isn’t just expanding, they’re pushing into industrial and commercial markets, rolling out smarter analytics, and onboarding utilities faster than most CRMs close a support ticket. The OpWorks acquisition? It didn’t just add states. It leveled up asset management across the board.
So while most of the world is still trying to figure out what “digital transformation” means, Waterly is already inside the pipes, building for the folks who keep them clean.
