Intellihub Acquires Taggle Systems For A$50M To Add Water Metering Network And Aqualus Software

Intellihub, the Australian smart-metering operator, is acquiring water IoT company Taggle Systems for a reported A$50 million, equivalent to about US$34.4 million, according to a reporting by the Australian Financial Review.

What Taggle brings to the transaction

Taggle describes work for more than 45 Australian water service providers over the past ten years, and its offer combines sensor networks with a meter data management platform called Aqualus Water. According to the Taggle product page, Aqualus covers reporting, leak detection, billing integration, meter reading and auditing, district metered area mass balance and a customer portal, with three built-in billing export schemas.

The company’s proprietary Taggle Byron network is a one-way low-power wide-area system that handles up to 30,000 sensor readings per hour per network. Endpoints are rated for more than 15 years of battery life at hourly transmissions, and Byron receivers reach 2 to 5 kilometres in urban areas and 5 to 50 kilometres in rural areas.

Connectivity options and partners

Besides Byron, Taggle supports Telstra NB-IoT as a secondary cellular option and Myriota satellite connectivity for remote locations, and it lists third-party options including NB-IoT, Sigfox, LoRa and Wize. It names Honeywell, through its Elster water meter business, as a supplier of integrated meters, along with Myriota and Telstra as connectivity partners.

Intellihub’s metering position

Intellihub was described in a December 2021 Origin Energy filing on the ASX as majority owned by Pacific Equity Partners, and in February 2024 it acquired the smart metering assets of Downer’s Spotless Advanced Metering business, about 100,000 on-market and embedded meters. Taggle would add a water-specific network and data platform to an electricity-metering base.

Benchmark: Melbourne’s digital water meter programme

The scale of Australian utility rollouts is set by programmes such as that of South East Water, which announced on 8 October 2026 that 300,000 digital meters are installed across Melbourne’s south-east and the Mornington Peninsula. The $272 million programme, delivered over six years, has saved an estimated 4.2 billion litres of drinking water and about $19.2 million in customer bills since 2018, as at June 2026, and South East Water projects up to 5 billion litres a year in savings once the programme finishes in 2029.

The comparison shows the volume at which an owner of metering networks and meter data software competes, and the next test for Intellihub is whether Aqualus and the Byron network can be sold to utilities at programmes of that size once the transaction completes.