With North Texas Ties, Subeca Raises $6M Series A to Scale Its IoT Water Technology

Subeca, a San Diego-based provider of next-generation water metering systems, said it raised $6 million in Series A funding.

Produced in Richardson, Subeca’s Blinc IoT module utilizes Amazon’s Sidewalk network, a free communications network that covers more than 90% of the U.S. population, to help its customers manage water infrastructure and detect and resolve water leaks.

“The funding will allow Subeca to rapidly scale to meet market demand for our flagship AMI solutions, particularly in small to medium sized utilities and companies that have been underserved by incumbents,” Subeca CEO Patrick Keaney said in a statement.

Keaney is the former Worldwide Head of Amazon AWS Water. He was appointed CEO of Subeca in May 2023.

Subeca said its differentiated end-to-end IoT offerings provide simple, easy-to-deploy options for the more than 40,000 utilities and businesses in the nation that have been locked out of the benefits of advanced metering and sensing technology because of the cost and complexity of legacy technology solutions.

The company said the Series A was led by SUEZ, a global leader in digital and circular solutions in waste and water services, with participation from Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund, Amazon’s sustainability focused corporate venture fund, and Burnt Island Ventures, a leading water sector-focused venture investor.

‘Smart metering solution’ for underserved communities

Subeca said it has built a smart water meter register that retrofits onto a majority of existing water meters in under one minute, essentially making dumb meters smart. For water utilities, that greatly reduces the cost of meter reading operations while increasing the amount of available data and insights to the utilities and their customers.

Subeca does this via its smart meter register (called PIN) devices that are instantly connected to the AWS cloud via Amazon Sidewalk.

“Subeca offers a simple and secure service that helps Amazon, AWS, and our utility partners gather timely and reliable data to manage water use without relying on traditional cellular or building network infrastructure,” said Beau Schilz, senior manager for Water in the Americas, AWS. “We’re excited to work with Subeca as we continue to improve the efficiency of water use in the communities where we operate as well as across our own operations, helping AWS make progress to meeting water positive by 2030;”

Joshua Cantone, managing director of SUEZ Digital Solutions for North America, said that “Subeca has developed a disruptive smart metering solution that will provide access to a previously underserved tier of utilities in the U.S.”

He added that his firm sees the potential of Subeca’s solutions.

“SUEZ, a leading provider of smart water metering solutions with more than 6 million units deployed worldwide, intends to leverage its expertise to support Subeca in scaling its offerings and go-to-market strategy. We believe in the vision of Subeca’s exceptional leadership team and look forward to supporting their evolution in the market,” Cantone said.

“Affordability challenges have stalled the adoption of smart metering across the U.S. and around the world,” Christine Boyle, partner at Burnt Island Ventures, said. “Subeca’s simple customer interface and integration with Amazon Sidewalk allows a new segment of water utilities to join the digital revolution. We’re excited to work with the Subeca team to bring this technology to market.”