Smart Skies, Healthy Waters named a winner of the fifth Water Breakthrough Challenge – sUAS News

The project sees Northumbrian Water working in partnership with Makutu, Skyports Drone Services, Newcastle University and Proteus Instruments

Over 10 years, the Ofwat Innovation Fund is investing £600 million in innovative projects and technologies to benefit the environment, society and customers

The fifth Water Breakthrough Challenge has awarded more than £42 million to 16 innovation projects solving major challenges in the water sector.

Durham, UK: Smart Skies, Healthy Waters, a world-first innovation that uses automated drones and real-time data analytics to monitor water quality has been named a winner of the fifth Water Breakthrough Challenge by the Ofwat Innovation Fund, also being a headline winning project for the challenge.

The project is a collaboration between Northumbrian Water, Makutu, Skyports Drone Services, Newcastle University and Proteus Instruments.

Current manual water quality monitoring methods are labour-intensive, infrequent and, when carried out at sea, carry safety risks. With limited alternative methods that are difficult to scale, Smart Skies Healthy Waters offers a world-first solution that will transform how the water sector can manage resources, respond to risk, and serve communities.

The solution works by combining automated drones, advanced sensors, and cloud-based analytics to deliver data directly to water companies and the general public, providing vital insights into the health of coastal waters. Samples will be analysed close to the site at “lab in a box” locations, providing results in near real-time. This data will then be made public, empowering visitors to the coastal sites with information on the quality of the water. This proactive, tech driven approach will transform how the water sector can manage resources, respond to risk, and serve communities.

Makutu brings deep expertise in cloud-native data platforms, AI, and IoT — typically associated with enterprise-scale digital transformation — into the heart of the UK’s environmental challenge. For Smart Skies, Healthy Waters, Makutu’s technology powers the real-time data infrastructure that turns raw sensor inputs into meaningful, accessible insights for decision-makers and the public.

Skyports is the world’s leading drone airline and an expert in operating long range automated drones in challenging environments, providing the supporting infrastructure and regulatory knowledge to bring complex logistical projects to life. Within this project Skyports brings water sampling and analysis sensors directly to waterways, providing a faster, safer, and more cost effective alternative to collecting water samples by hand.

Richard Warneford, Head of Wastewater at Northumbrian Water, said: “This project provides a ground-breaking opportunity to harness new technologies to enable more frequent monitoring of our bathing waters. It will be a world-first and a step change for our sector, helping to ensure healthier waters for our customers, communities and our environment.”

James Sumsion, CEO, Makutu said: “Smart Skies Healthy Waters is a powerful example of how innovative thinking can tackle real-world challenges, in this case, bringing real-time coastal water quality data directly to the public. We’re proud to be working alongside Northumbrian Water and Skyports Drone Services on this world-first initiative, which will improve operational efficiency whilst driving environmental sustainability. This funding marks a major milestone, enabling us to scale our impact — not just across the UK, but globally — delivering high-quality, actionable data exactly when and where it’s needed.”

Alex Brown, Director of Drone Services, Skyports, said: “Monitoring and improving the UK’s water quality is so important to all of us. With drones we can reach further, more frequently and provide better insights compared to the normal way of collecting water samples. We started working with Northumbria Water and Makutu two years ago with our first water monitoring service, and this is the latest milestone to take this service to the next step. In the future we see a large network of water monitoring drones flying Beyond Visual Line of Sight around key water sites in the UK, providing instant insights back to Northumbrian Water, as well as other utilities, allowing them to take action where required to keep our waterways clean.”

David Black, CEO of Ofwat said: 

“Water underpins our society and economy, and the water sector faces a range of challenges requiring urgent solutions. The Ofwat Innovation Fund was established five years ago to incentivise the water sector to collaborate with partners across industry, charities, and academia to accelerate the pace of transformation and create lasting benefits for customers and the environment.  The level of ambition of this year’s winners is remarkable. We are supporting these projects to prove their impact so that they can be scaled, not only here in England and Wales, but exported around the world as a driver of economic growth”. 

The Ofwat Innovation Fund is a key pillar in Ofwat’s mission to drive innovation that ensures the water sector is ready for the challenges of the future and results in better outcomes for customers and the environment. It is delivered by innovation prize experts Challenge Works (part of the Nesta group), in partnership with Arup and Isle Utilities.  

To find out more about all 16 of the winners of the fifth Water Breakthrough Challenge or to discover previous winners, visit waterinnovation.challenges.org 

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