Digital Water Works Receives Strategic Investment from Bentley Systems

Digital Water Works, a leading global innovator of digital twin solutions for smart wet infrastructure, announced a strategic investment in the firm by Bentley Systems. The investment allows Digital Water Works and Bentley to expand their leadership in bringing superior infrastructure digital twin solutions to municipal and investor-owned water and wastewater utilities worldwide — solutions with the power to enhance their operational visibility, improve efficiency, optimize capital spending, and lower total cost of ownership of their wet infrastructure.

Digital Water Works’ strategy is to implement its own integrating applications around best-of-breed commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) software such as Bentley Systems’ OpenFlows and iTwin offerings, which Bentley will license directly to Digital Water Works’ customers. The software partnership is not exclusive; Digital Water Works will continue to collaborate with leading software vendors and engineering and technology consulting firms to best serve the water industry. By virtue of the investment, Bentley will be entitled to appoint two directors to the Digital Water Works board.

With deep industry knowledge, world-class capabilities, and cutting-edge technology, Digital Water Works is uniquely positioned to help water and wastewater utilities deploy a scalable, flexible, and holistic digital twin geospatial infrastructure platform based on industry standards and COTS software. This revolutionary geospatial platform enables utilities to operate and sustain more resilient wet infrastructure while maintaining compliance, meeting appropriate levels of service at the lowest total lifecycle cost, and increasing customer satisfaction.

Combining real-time intelligence with spatial analytics, digital twins enable pervasive simulation of water distribution and sewer collection systems with immersive visualization and analytics visibility of decision support results for operational performance monitoring and efficiency optimization, powered by artificial intelligence.  Digital twins also enable work and asset management (both discrete and linear assets), reliability-centered maintenance with bad actor and root cause analysis, and risk-based strategic lifecycle asset management to optimize lifecycle costs, extend infrastructure useful life, and prioritize, manage and deliver capital improvement projects.

Digital Water Works founder and CEO Paul F. Boulos  said that the infrastructure digital twin product suite would be rolled out in phases during the next five to ten months; and that next month, the company will launch an early adopter program for progressive water and wastewater utilities and engineering firms who want to help with the product design plans and then beta-test the software.

Bentley Systems CEO Greg Bentley said that the company’s investment in Digital Water Works signifies its recognition that a specialist digital integrator entity will play an indispensable role in helping infrastructure owners to take full advantage of digital twins’ potential. Bentley’s OpenFlows modeling software and iTwin Services offerings can advantageously anchor water and wastewater utilities’ advancements in going digital. But the company believes even more strongly that an open approach, supported by an independent integrator leveraging Bentley’s unprecedented open-source solution environment, can achieve the greatest benefits for each utility, while accelerating the learning curve for all. 

Keywords: Digital Water Works, Bentley Systems, Digital Twins, Water and Wastewater, ARC Advisory Group