Pani Energy

When – and how – was your company born?
Pani Energy was founded with the spirit of research within the halls of the University of Victoria’s Engineering and Chemistry department. Devesh, Pani Energy’s Founder, was searching for a professor in his first year of undergrad with whom he could partner to bring the desalination technology idea to life. After going door-to-door to several professors’ offices (and being turned down), he partnered with Dr. Tom Fyles (the only one courageous enough to take him in), who would later join Pani Energy as the Chief Scientific Officer.

After years of R&D and close to graduation, Devesh formed a partnership with Ian MacDonald (now the Chairman), former professor of Electrical Engineering from the University of Alberta, to found Pani Energy (with the help from Uvic’s Innovation Centre) in March 2017 and commercialize its desalination technology.

Who are some of your clients? What projects are you working on right now, and what do they do?
Pani’s clients are owners and operators of medium to large-scale desalination plants, as well as industrial and municipal wastewater treatment plants. For example, Pani works with cement and thermal power plants in India and reverse osmosis plants in the US to lower their energy consumption (and therefore operational costs), effectively lowering their carbon emissions at the same time. Other clients include pulp & paper, and food & beverage plants. All require a lot of water! Pani is currently targeting plants in Canada, the USA, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific.

What was a pivotal moment for your company?
While presenting the concept for the company’s initial product, Osmotic Energy Storage (OES) at the Clean Energy BC conference, we were amazed by the strong support from the industry. We had industry experts labelling OES as THE solution to the energy storage crisis. The industry push encouraged us to build a larger prototype and look at OES as a viable commercial solution (away from the academic world). This encouragement lead to several IP applications for OES, ultimately uncovering Pani Energy’s second discovery Adaptive Desalination Technology (ADT) – a way to reduce energy consumption and operating costs in desalination. This was complemented by a 2-month trip that involved visiting the majority of Indian sea water desalination plants. The strong traction for Pani’s ADT process from a diverse water market like India drove the message home and the company is now commercializing its desalination technology in India by retrofitting existing desalination plants. Since then, the company has pivoted and evolved the technology and product even further. With continuous feedback from the largest companies and accelerators in the water industry, Pani focused its offering into a scalable and tiered SaaS offering: an AI Coach for plant operators, that leverages machine learning to optimize the entire plant (not just one process, like many other digital solutions) saving time, costs, resources, and emissions.