River Fever: Making the invisible visible

Project Abstract

Industrial thermal pollution creates massive ecological risks and financial liabilities, yet current monitoring relies on inadequate ground sensors, leaving companies blind to non-compliance. River Fever is a B2B SaaS platform that transforms public satellite data into a proactive monitoring system, providing automated alerts that empower industrial operators to prevent costly shutdowns and multi-million-euro fines. Our credible go-to-market strategy begins with an ESA-backed pilot to secure our first €15k/year contracts, targeting a European market of power plants and regulators. This project roadmap details our plan to evolve from a validated MVP into a global water intelligence platform, turning regulatory risk into a manageable, data-driven operational advantage.

The GitHub repository can be found here .

Challenge #2: Tracking and preventing water pollution

The Problem: The Invisible Fever in Our Waters

Every day, critical infrastructure like power plants, data centers, and heavy industrial factories pull in massive amounts of water for cooling. This water is then discharged back into rivers, lakes, and coastal areas at elevated temperatures, creating a phenomenon known as thermal pollution.

This isn't just warm water; it's an ecological threat that disrupts entire ecosystems, leading to fish kills, harmful algal blooms, and long-term biodiversity loss. Consequently, strict environmental laws like the EU Water Framework Directive and the US Clean Water Act define legal "mixing zones" where this heat must dissipate and heat dissipation not continue beyond this zone/boundary.

The core of the problem lies in how compliance is monitored. The current method relies on a few scattered, expensive ground sensors placed at fixed points. This creates massive blind spots, allowing the true size, shape, and ecological impact of these hot water patches to flow by completely undetected. Plant managers are forced to guess if they are compliant, and underfunded regulators have little choice but to trust those guesses.

Our Solution: The River Fever Web Platform

River Fever is a proactive monitoring and decision-support platform that replaces guesswork with geographic certainty. We transform complex satellite data into an intuitive web platform that shows the complete picture of the impact that thermal impact of the water used for cooling in industrial use case.

Core functions of our platform:

1. Proactive Monitoring & Automated Warnings: We use satellite thermal data to create a comprehensive heat map of the entire water body. Our system automatically detects thermal plumes, maps the plume as a thermal delta heath map(compared to set ambient) on the water body. Then it sends an alert to an operators in case the heat impact(water temp. after mixing with ambient)of their discharge exceeds the legal boundary(the boundary set by national regulators called mixing zone) above a critical ecological threshold. This gives them chance to act before if an exceedance is likely or in case it occurs.
2. The Cooling Scenario Simulator: This is our key innovation. More than just a warning system, River Fever is meant to be a decision-making tool. An operator can simulate scenarios to answer critical questions like, "If we reduce our thermal output by 5% starting tomorrow, what will the river temperature profile look like in a week?" This empowers them to manage their thermal footprint proactively, optimize operations, and ensure compliance.(not yet operational to be developed in the future).

Users:

Targeted Users(Market)

Primary Customer – Industrial Operators: Power plant and heavy industry managers who use the system to monitor thermal discharge in real time and avoid regulatory penalties.Operational and data teams who analyze alerts and insights to optimize cooling processes and resolve issues quickly.

Secondary Customer – Environmental Agencies & Regulators: Government bodies and compliance officers who use the platform to monitor and enforce violations more efficiently, while acting as a key adoption driver by demonstrating faster, on-demand satellite-based oversight compared to traditional on-site inspections. 

Industrial operators use the platform to stay compliant, regulators use it to verify and monitor compliance, and internal teams act on the insights—creating a shared, data-driven feedback loop that aligns operations with regulation.

Business Model & Path to Revenue

Our business model is a straightforward B2B SaaS platform with an annual subscription fee of approximately €15,000 per facility. Our roadmap to our first revenue is direct and strategic:

1. Secure Strategic Incubation & Alliances: Our first step is to gain support from the ESA Business Incubation Centre and align with projects like SureWater. This will provide us with the credibility, mentorship, and industry network needed to approach key players.

2. Launch a Credibility-Backed Pilot Program: We will leverage our new network to partner with a major European power plant and a regional environmental agency. This 3-month pilot will serve to validate our solution with real-world data and produce a powerful case study.

Convert Pilot Success to First Revenue: Following a successful pilot, our goal is to convert these initial partners into our first paying customers on an annual contract, proving our commercial model and securing our first recurring revenue.

Tech:

Our platform integrates data from multiple satellite sources to provide a complete and accurate picture:

• Thermal Monitoring (Landsat 8/9): We leverage the thermal infrared sensors on the Landsat satellites to detect and map the spatial extent of industrial discharge plumes. By analyzing temperature variance against ambient water conditions, we generate differential heat maps that isolate and quantify a facility’s specific thermal footprint.

• Contextual Mapping (Copernicus Sentinel-2): We leverage the near infrared light to identify  the water bodies. Based on the map provided the corresponding mixing zone is drawn for each location

Impact: From Reactive Penalty to Proactive Performance

The impact of this transformation is immediate and profound, shifting our customers from a reactive state of regulatory risk to a proactive state of operational control. For plant operators, River Fever replaces guesswork with geographic certainty, a change with multi-million-euro consequences.

Let's ground this in financial reality. Consider "Plant X," a major coastal power station, during a summer heatwave. Without our platform, its thermal plume silently extends beyond the legal mixing zone, leaving it blind to two catastrophic outcomes. Scenario one: Regulators force a 20% power reduction to comply, potentially costing over €500,000 in lost revenue per day. Scenario two: They continue operating and face a cumulative fine of, say, €50,000 per day, easily exceeding €1 million in a few weeks.

With River Fever, this entire crisis is averted. Our platform's proactive alerts provide the crucial foresight days in advance, turning a potential multi-million-euro liability into a manageable operational decision. Instead of facing a shutdown, the operator can now make minor, early-stage adjustments based on our insights. The annual subscription to our service becomes a rounding error compared to the cost of a single day of non-compliance, transforming our platform from an expense into an effective insurance for their revenue and reputation.

High-Level Strategic Roadmap

Year 1: Foundational Validation

• Product: Validate the core monitoring MVP in a live pilot, gathering the essential data needed to model our key differentiator—the Scenario Simulator.

• Business: Secure ESA incubation to gain credibility and leverage their network to land a flagship pilot program with a major European power company.

Year 2: Commercialization & Market Entry

• Product: Refine the MVP into a sellable commercial product based on pilot feedback and build the functional alpha of the Scenario Simulator.

• Business: Convert the pilot partner into our first recurring revenue, proving the business model. Use that case study to acquire a foothold of 3-5 early adopter clients.

Year 3: Scaling & Product Differentiation

• Product: Launch the Scenario Simulator in beta to key customers, establishing a clear competitive moat. Develop APIs to enable scaling and integration.

• Business: Expand from the initial beachhead in power generation into adjacent industrial markets (chemicals, data centers) and build a reseller channel through environmental consultancies.

Year 4: Enterprise Dominance

• Product: Publicly launch the fully-featured Scenario Simulator and build the enterprise-grade features (e.g., advanced security, compliance modules) required for large-scale contracts.

• Business: Target and secure contracts with national-level environmental regulators and convert existing clients into high-value, multi-site enterprise deals.

Year 5: Global Expansion & Innovation

• Product: Evolve the platform by integrating predictive AI/ML into the simulator and expanding from thermal-only to broader water quality intelligence.

• Business: Launch a targeted market entry into North America and form strategic alliances with major engineering firms to embed our platform in future infrastructure projects.

Team

Geo-David Sofran - Software Engineer & Team Lead

• Embedded SW, AI and Robotics, Cloud DevOps

Andreea Gheorghe, PhD- Communication Expert & Human Centric Designer

• Needs analysis, people centered research, data storytelling, public speaking

Ioan-Vladimir Sarbu - Software Engineer & Toolsmith

• Embedded SW, Electronics, AI and Control Engineering. Passionate about infrastructure.

Tudor-Gabriel Nicolaescu - Software Engineer

• Web development, Embedded SW, AI and Machine Learning, Linux Fan, DevOps and CI\CD

Alexandru Lucaciu Lucian - Software Engineer

• Embedded SW, Hardware enthusiast, Sportive pilot

Marton Szabolcs - Software & Mechanical Engineer

• Web development, Embedded SW, Satellite data processing basics, CAM/CAD

Andrei Botond Futo - Technical Project Manager & Economist

• Waterfall and agile management frameworks, Planning, Coordination and monitoring, Data Analysis, Financial Analysis, Business strategy