You are out trekking, your water bottle is empty and you can upon a stream and think – drink or not to drink?

An Israeli startup, 'Lishtot', has the answer!

Netanel Raisch is a four time startup founder, has four patents to his name and for the last four years, he’s been building his latest startup, Lishtot.

Lishtot in Hebrew means to drink, said Raisch, co-founder and chief executive officer.

“Water is the most essential thing that we drink, we consume, we pay for it and we do it for air. But we don’t know anything about the water that we consume. Based on the Indian statistics, 30 percent of the bottled water in India is fake. You need to know what you are paying for. So, what we want is to give people a tool to decide to drink or not to drink that’s why the company name is Lishtot,” Raisch said.

Raisch’s partner Dr Allen Bavor found that water actually has interactions with materials that generate electric field.

For instance, water with arsenic will have a different electric field than the water with biological residue e-coli and salmonella.

Bavor said, “What we do with this device is we actually program it with in algorithm to detect good water. If it detects good water like drinkable water it will show you blue otherwise it will show you red.”

“So I decided to test the ‘Test Drop’. Bottled water – good to drink. Pour some into a glass and take a sip. Then on testing the water in the glass the Test Drop indicates red. That’s because the water now has traces of my saliva – making it unfit for others to consume. He claims the startup is the first to detect the water contamination without transmitting anything. Since the team is merely collecting data, they manage keep cost low.”

"We don’t need any transmitter or to shoot any beam into water, we don’t need. We have two types of competitors. First, water labs that charge you a lot to give you higher resolution. Second, are water testing kits that pack in contents like kind of chemicals and other thing that you need to mix, you need to be like a scientist to use that. Hence, we want to give users a tool that anyone can use,” said Bavor.

How It Works?

The test drop transmits data to the Lishtot app where one can set their geography and the sensitivity of the test drop.

Over time, the team believes their water safety map and database will become the go-to solution for citizens and travelers to detect abnormalities and find clean water and for government bodies and companies to watch out for negative trends and fix them.

Presently, all of the manufacturing takes place in Israel and they have capacity to produce up to 100,000 units per month.

Lishtot is one of the startups recognised under the Israel-India Innovation Bridge and Netanel and his team have already started working in India which they see as their biggest market.

Presently, Lishtot’s core technology can detect over 20 different contaminants at World Health Organization (WHO) standards and the team is also building tools that citizens can use to directly to report problems to their water utility companies.

First Published:Aug 1, 2018 7:29 PM IST