About a year ago, Azim Premji had painted a grim picture of Bengaluru’s water situation when he said the city may have to be evacuated in a decade due to acute water shortage.
Now here’s a trio that has hit upon an idea from Bengaluru’s predicament. Founded by Rohit Reddy, Girish Vishweshwaraiah and Shashidhar Reddy, Water Bucket today has four more who work part-time. Water Bucket provides consumers a platform to order pure and safe drinking water, online, irrespective of day or night.
Girish had completed his MBA in finance from Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) and was working at Thomson Reuters. He had about two years of experience by the time we started this venture. Rohit completed his MCA from Visvesvaraya Technological University and had settled in his family business.
Shashidhar Reddy completed his Master of Science in Engineering in Electrical Engineering at University of Pennsylvania and had just moved to Bengaluru after working with Siemens Corporate Research .
Speaking of the genesis, he said, “We wanted to start a venture and had listed about 20 ideas (excluding this). A friend of mine was visiting Bengaluru and I met him at Belandur. During discussion, the topic of unavailability of water in those areas came up and that’s when I realised that it was an idea whose time had come.”
Born and brought up in Bengaluru, the trio were more or less familiar with the water situation, and they decided to take a plunge into a business that involved supplying water right away. “A lot of research went into it before we decided on a framework, which we have today,” said Reddy.
While a couple of startups operated in this space in Bengaluru, they only dealt with supplying water bottles, and they had no automation of services whatsoever. Water Bucket wanted to be in the whole gamut of water supply -- be it water cans or tankers.
Water Bucket is now looking to raise about `1 crore and these funds, the firm believes would aid it in keeping its operations open across Bengaluru for about 12-15 months when it would look at more funding and it also has more cities in its sight. “A good part of these funds are aimed at technology development,” said Shashidhar Reddy.