A conventional tap releases around 10 to 12 litres a minute, and much of it bounces off your hands and goes straight down the drain. EarthFokus, a Chennai-based, IIT Madras-incubated water-tech startup, started from that observation. The company says its products have now helped more than 130 commercial buildings save over five billion litres of water, according to a profile in The Better India published on 9 November 2026.
From a tap to a building
Arun Subramanian and Rishi Vandan founded EarthFokus in 2019, the same year Chennai hit its Day Zero water crisis. Their first product was a fixture that cut tap flow to as little as 0.5 litres a minute. It drew attention during the pandemic, when handwashing surged, and early corporate orders came from clients including Cognizant.
Then the founders ran into a problem. Buyers saw the fixture as one more plumbing accessory, so the company shifted from selling products to measuring consumption and verifying the savings.
Three products
- WaterOS uses IoT-enabled flow meters and sensors on supply lines, floors, washrooms and cooling towers, sending data to the cloud. It learns normal usage by time of day, occupancy and season, and flags anomalies. A steady flow in a restroom at 2 am, for instance, points to a running toilet or a leaking valve that could otherwise go unnoticed for weeks.
- EcoVapure targets cooling towers, which lose water through evaporation. Its deployed technology, Capture, catches droplets from a visible vapour plume and returns them to the system. The company says it can recover roughly 30% of evaporation loss under suitable conditions. A second approach, Convert, is in development for towers without visible plumes.
- WaterFokus covers fixtures and aerators that reduce flow while keeping a strong-feeling stream.
Why this matters
Cooling towers run in offices, factories and data centres, and Chennai keeps adding data-centre capacity. For that build-out, water is turning into an operating constraint rather than a utility line item. A monthly bill tells a facility manager what was used after the fact. Near-real-time metering with anomaly detection tells them while there is still time to act.
Not every Tamil Nadu startup story is about AI. This one is careful engineering on a problem Chennai has lived through.
