EmNet: the sewer software the city beta-tested

LAUNCHED 2004 · SMART SEWER LIVE BY 2010 · BOUGHT BY XYLEM 2018

The cleanest homegrown exit in this record began as a city contract: EmNet — shorthand for "embedded networks" — was launched in 2004 as a collaborative partnership between the City of South Bend and the University of Notre Dame, initially funded by the State of Indiana, to solve the problem the Rivers section of this history documents at federal length: combined sewers that overflowed into the St. Joseph River whenever it rained hard. The technology came out of a Notre Dame laboratory — the real-time decision-support work of electrical engineering professor Michael Lemmon — and the enterprise was led to market by Luis Montestruque, then finishing his graduate work at Notre Dame, who became the company's president and chief technology officer. The arrangement was the unusual part, and it is documented in the buyer's own release: South Bend served as EmNet's beta client for many years while the company developed its platform of sensor-and-valve networks and decision-support tools. Sensors and smart valves went into the city's sewers — the university's photograph of the Niles Avenue installation is dated 2010 — and by that year EmNet had a fully commissioned system operational in South Bend.

The results are printed at the size their sources give them. The university's account credits the Smart Sewer with keeping more than a billion gallons of overflow a year out of the St. Joseph River and saving the city 1.5 million dollars annually; the federal ledger of the same system's later expansion — the sensor network, the gates, the capture rates the city and the EPA negotiated — sits in the Rivers section, where it belongs, and the two tellings are left to stand as their makers made them. From the beta city the company built a client list across the country, in the Great Lakes and Great Plains and in tide-impacted coastal systems including Los Angeles and San Francisco. On February 6, 2018, Xylem Inc., the global water-technology company, announced it had acquired EmNet; the financial terms were not disclosed, and none is printed here. Mayor Pete Buttigieg's sentence in the release is the city's own summary of the experiment: "EmNet has been a shining example of city government and tech firms collaborating to find solutions." Fourteen years from a state-funded launch to acquisition by a public company — the timeline the IDEA Center's leadership, in the university's telling, set out to compress for the next spinouts: an idea, a city willing to be its first customer, and an exit, all on South Bend ground.

Sources:

1. Xylem Inc., press release, February 6, 2018 — the acquisition of EmNet, LLC; the 2004 launch as a partnership of the City of South Bend and the University of Notre Dame, led by Luis Montestruque and initially funded by the State of Indiana; South Bend as beta client; terms not disclosed. xylem.com
2. University of Notre Dame, "Going with the Flow" — the technology's origin in Professor Michael Lemmon's laboratory; Montestruque recruited from graduate school to lead the venture; the system fully commissioned in South Bend by 2010; more than a billion gallons of overflow a year kept from the river and 1.5 million dollars saved annually, on the university's figures; the client list. nd.edu (stories.nd.edu)
3. the The St. Joseph River section of this history — the combined-sewer system's federal ledger: the 2011 consent framework, the smart-sewer sensor counts and the capture targets, from the agencies' own documents.