Deepak Garg sometimes sounds more like an activist for water and electricity resources instead of a veteran businessman at the helm of a 1,200-plus-employee company.
For the most part, he’s both.
As the CEO of Irvine-based Smart Energy Water, Garg uses technology to help utilities and their consumers conserve water and energy, a mission that he says goes well beyond the profits and losses of a typical business.
He founded the company a decade ago to “save every drop of water and every electron” so that no resource goes to waste.
“We as a technology platform are really making sure that people around the globe are empowered, educated and engaged, which is billions of people,” Garg said.
Access to water and power is a “fundamental human right,” Garg said. His firm, also known as SEW, is rapidly expanding globally to realize that goal, with a growing client base in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Australia and New Zealand.
The company will add another 400-plus employees this year, according to Garg, who says the company has been profitable and growing since its founding in 2012.
“We have been growing over 50% year-to-year right now” and the company has over 400 clients, he told the Business Journal on April 15.
The company, which had about 40 job postings on its website last week, has a “focus on digital, the focus on mobility, AI, and machine learning.”
“We are in the business of connecting billions of people to energy and water ecosystems,” Garg said. He holds degrees from Stanford and MIT.
Last year, Garg estimated there were 2.8 billion people in the world without clean water, while 3.2 billion people don’t have constant power.
Energy and utility companies pay SEW for subscriptions to its cloud-based platform, and then let their millions of customers—households, businesses and others—use the service to save on water and energy consumption, as well as pay bills and manage their accounts.
Some of SEW’s local energy and utility clients include San Diego Gas & Electric Co., Imperial Irrigation District, Moulton Niguel Water District, Southern California Edison and Southern California Gas Co.
In addition to serving individual customers, SEW’s platform provides analytics to the utilities themselves, so that they can better monitor field operations, manage assets and inventory, dispatch field crews and perform other resource-saving services better.
