Built for the people protecting water. Built to protect what they know.
We spent our careers inside water utilities, wiring up SCADA and building digital twins. OCore is what we built when we admitted that none of it captured the judgment of the person running the plant.
It's 3:30 on a Friday, and a 31-year operator clocks out for the last time. There's cake in the break room. Somebody gives a speech. Then he walks to his truck carrying three decades of things that were never written down: the flow trend that means a pump station will overflow by morning if nobody acts, the analyzer that reads fine but has been drifting out of calibration for weeks, the one alarm out of 400 that actually matters tonight. On Monday, the plant runs without it.
This is the quietest emergency in water, and it's happening everywhere at once. This decade, 1.7 million water professionals are expected to retire, half the workforce in ten years. A utility can hire operators. It can't hire the experience that turns a wall of alarms into a calm, correct decision at 2 a.m.
Every one of those decisions is in service of public health. Which coagulant dose works when the source water changes in the spring. Which filter runs short during high-algae spikes. When a turbidity reading is a sensor malfunction and when it isn't. Thousands of small judgments, every shift, protecting communities that never see any of it. There's no shortcut to that knowledge, and none of it is in the manual.
24 years
Average tenure of operators retiring now. Most want to pass along what they know. But you can't transfer two decades of accumulated wisdom in a three-month training window. Not in a binder, not in a shadowing program, not in any system that has existed until now.
Built by people who saw the problem firsthand.
We know, because we spent our careers inside these utilities. Between them, OCore's founders spent over 45 years implementing technology for water utilities and integrating the SCADA systems they depend on. We helped write the industry's playbook for the digital twin and guided utilities around the world through their digital transformations. Some of us carried operator licenses ourselves.
And we had to face an uncomfortable truth about our own work: the systems we built recorded every data point and almost none of the judgment. Ten thousand tags, a digital twin of every pipe and pump, and still nothing that twins the operator. We spent years helping utilities climb the ladder from data to information, and from information to knowledge. The last rung, wisdom, never lived in the systems. It lived in the people. And the people were leaving.
So we refused two easy answers. We refused the fashionable one: software that takes the decisions away from operators, as if the person were the problem. And we refused the comfortable one: waiting until knowledge turns into data, then mining whatever the veterans leave behind. The data tells you what happened. It never tells you what the veteran knew, or why. If you want that, you have to ask while they're still on shift.
That's what OCore does. It captures what veteran operators know, while they know it, and turns it into a living O&M manual: not a binder, but knowledge that stays current and actually gets used. When an alarm fires, the right procedure surfaces on its own, along with the reasoning behind it. And through all of it, the operator stays in command. The core is running in real plants today, with real operators, on real shifts.
We believe that knowledge deserves better.
We believe the operator, not the algorithm, is the last line of defense for public health.
We believe the veteran who was never once asked to write it down, because there was never time, deserves to leave a legacy instead of a gap.
And we believe the fourteen-month operator alone on a night shift deserves better than to find the right procedure thirty seconds too late.
The team.
Deep roots in water utility operations, control systems, and AI, with training from MIT and Anthropic and careers spent serving the largest, most complex utilities across the globe.
Mike Karl
CO-FOUNDER & CEO
Over 25 years leading digital transformation at AECOM, Brown and Caldwell, and CH2M HILL. Lead author of SWAN Forum industry guides on digital twins and smart water. Licensed Water Distribution Manager.
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Eric Smith
CO-FOUNDER & CTO
Two decades designing and implementing SCADA and automation systems for water treatment plants, distribution networks, and industrial facilities. President of APCO, leading control system integration for critical infrastructure.
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Garrett Cammans
CO-FOUNDER & CHIEF GROWTH OFFICER
Founded NAWC Inc., growing revenue 10x over five years before a successful acquisition. Former enterprise sales lead at Qualtrics for government and utility verticals.
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Todd Smith
SENIOR SALES EXECUTIVE
Over 25 years in automation and control systems with deep market relationships across utilities and municipalities in the western United States. Former technical sales lead for VTScada by Trihedral.
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Scott Carlson
SENIOR DEVELOPER
Hands-on developer behind the OCore platform. Previously team manager at Indevity. Holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Utah.
LINKEDINOur commitment, and the only measure we'll accept: the operator stays in command, the wisdom gets captured before it walks out the door, and the next shift is safer than the last.
Your operators know what matters. OCore makes sure nobody forgets.
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