MayimFlow wants to stop data center leaks before they happen

THE mania Around data centers, many companies are seeking to become “picks and shovels” providers, building profitable businesses that are ancillary to the gold rush of selling server access or training top-tier AI models.

MayimFlow, the winner of the Built World stage of this year’s competition Disruption TechCrunchis a good example. The startup is primarily focused on one task: preventing damaging water leaks.

Data centers use a lot of water, and that water can pose a significant risk, even if the leak is small. Founder John Khazraee told TechCrunch that many data centers only have reactive solutions for water leaks. This can cause businesses to experience downtime and cost them millions of dollars if it happens.

Khazraee would know. He spent over 15 years building infrastructure for IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. With MayimFlow, it has developed a combination of IoT sensors and machine learning models deployed at the edge that can detect signs of impending leaks.

“I noticed these problems in data centers, and the only solution they had was, ‘When a leak happens, we find out,'” he said in an interview. “Now you have to spend a lot of money to fix the situation. Now you have to turn off the servers. Now the data is disrupted. So I decided to do something.”

Khazraee has assembled a small team with a lot of experience to take on this challenge. Jim Wong, MayimFlow’s chief strategy officer, has spent decades working with data centers. Ray Lok, Chief Technology Officer, has built a career in water management and IoT infrastructure.

Beyond the more frightening consequences of unnoticed water leaks, there’s an element of frugality to what Khazraee is trying to do with MayimFlow, which he says comes from his childhood.

“I grew up in a very, you know, I don’t want to say the word ‘poor’ family, but we weren’t the most well-off family,” he said. “And my dad would always say to me, when I took a shower, ‘Hey, you’re in the shower too long. Are you singing in there?'”

Growing up, Khazraee said he was always thinking about how to make things more efficient — especially as he studied to become an engineer. In college, he worked at a facility that collected cooking oil from restaurants and converted it into biodiesel. It was “complicated work,” he said, but he liked the end result.

Now Khazraee is trying to blend that penchant for frugality with her team’s experience. He believes they can notify data center operators 24 to 48 hours in advance when repairs will be needed.

MayimFlow has collected a multitude of data samples from various industrial water systems that allow them to make these types of predictions, he said. The company can provide sensors that can help monitor a water system or connect its machine learning models to existing ones if companies already have similar hardware.

Khazraee said he wants to expand this solution beyond data centers, to commercial buildings, hospitals, manufacturing facilities and perhaps even utilities. In his eyes, any company wishing to quickly detect leaks or optimize its water consumption could be a customer.

Khazraee thinks it’s such an opportunity that he turned down positions at several large tech companies while building MayimFlow over the past two years.

“I really believe in the vision. I believe in the impact that we have,” he said. “Water is becoming one of the great problems of our world. »