HULO is a watertech company based in the Netherlands that uses artificial intelligence to combat global water loss by helping utilities find and fix leaks far faster than traditional methods allow. Around the world, a significant share of treated drinking water is lost to leaks before it ever reaches customers - a problem known as non-revenue water that wastes energy, money, and an increasingly scarce resource. HULO's mission is to make leak detection fast, accurate, and affordable so utilities can dramatically reduce these losses.
The company's SaaS platform ingests pressure and flow data from a utility's existing sensors and applies a combination of AI and physics-based hydraulic models to understand the dynamic behavior of each unique water network. From this, it can detect, size, and localize new leaks and anomalies within minutes rather than the days or weeks conventional approaches require. HULO reports roughly three times better performance than traditional leak-detection algorithms, with fewer false alarms and the ability to localize even smaller leaks across large, complex networks.
A key advantage of HULO's approach is that it requires no new hardware and no district metered areas (DMAs) - the costly network segmentation that many leak-detection methods depend on. By working with infrastructure utilities already have, HULO integrates seamlessly into existing operations and lowers the barrier to adoption. This enables utilities to shift from reactive, break-and-fix maintenance toward a preventive model that catches problems early, reducing water loss, repair costs, and service disruptions.
HULO originated from Wetsus, the institute for Sustainable Water Technology in Leeuwarden, and is led by CEO Robbert Lodewijks and CTO Frank van der Hulst. It works with utilities including Vitens, Brabant Water, and WML, and is active across the Netherlands, the EU, and the UK, with early steps into Latin America. In October 2025 the company raised a €2.3 million seed round led by VP Capital and LUMO Labs, with participation from Vanagon, Rabobank, the FOM, and the Netherlands Enabling Water Technology fund, following an earlier €800,000 pre-seed round.