Chris Klein and the trouble with watering in the rain

The sprinklers were keeping their appointments. That was the trouble. During the drought year of 2012, Chris Klein was walking his dog through Denver’s Platt Park neighborhood when rain finally arrived. Around him, irrigation systems carried on watering. The sky was doing the job for free. The equipment seemed determined to invoice somebody anyway.

Klein had noticed a small absurdity with a large consequence: a machine could obey its schedule while ignoring the reason for the schedule. He would help build Rachio around that gap. A sprinkler controller ought to consider the weather before opening a valve. It sounds obvious until you consider how many perfectly serviceable clocks have been entrusted with decisions.

By October 2025, Rain Bird had acquired the Denver company, with Klein continuing as its CEO. Between the dog walk and that announcement lay a startup weekend, several generations of hardware, manufacturing decisions, and a growing collection of devices for the yard. The original complaint remained refreshingly easy to explain.

Between ideas, until one stuck

At Denver Startup Weekend in 2012, Klein was looking for people to build with. He later described arriving between ideas, open to joining a team. The event offered 54 hours to turn an initial proposition into something other people could examine. He brought the water-waste problem. People gathered around it.

“I ended up pitching a problem and a team formed around it.”

Chris Klein, reflecting on Startup Weekend

That is a useful detail in a founder’s history. The first commitment was to an irritation worth investigating. By 2013, Klein and fellow co-founder Franz Garsombke were building Rachio. In 2014, its Iro controller was available through Home Depot, and the company returned to the Denver event as a sponsor. The participant had acquired something valuable to bring back.

Klein’s route there involved construction as well as software. He had studied construction systems management and pursued ways to make construction drawings digital and easier to access. He earned an MBA from the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business in 2008. Later, there was a classifieds app called Slinggit. That venture ended when his desire to pursue it ran out.

Rachio gave those interests a common address: the yard. There was physical infrastructure to understand, software to write, and a business to make work. Conservation also gave him a reason to stay interested. His projects had changed; the habit of wanting to make things remained.

The forecast gets a vote

The controller’s job was to make an existing sprinkler system respond to more than the hour. Weather mattered. So did the conditions in different parts of a yard. A patch of ground in shade has a different assignment from a sunny slope. Treating both identically is convenient for a timer, less useful for the person paying the water bill.

Rachio’s second generation arrived in 2016 with cloud software that considered recent and approaching weather alongside information about the landscape. It also connected with Amazon Echo and Alexa. Owners could ask for watering by voice. The product combined that conspicuous convenience with the quieter work of adjusting irrigation.

For Klein, the connection between the two was commercial as well as environmental. A customer could want a simpler routine, a usable app, or more control over a system. Those ordinary desires created a route for conservation into daily life. The product had to earn a place in the household before its water-saving ambition could matter there.

In March 2018, Rachio announced a $10 million Series B alongside Rachio 3 and a wireless flow meter. The controller recommended watering using location, vegetation and soil information. The flow meter was designed to identify leaks and trigger alerts, with automatic shutdown intended to limit damage. Klein was building around the moments when equipment should do less, or stop entirely.

A factory within driving distance

The business also depended on a much less glamorous form of connectivity: being able to reach the people making the hardware. In 2017, Rachio used US contract manufacturers, with most controllers coming from Vergent Products in Loveland, Colorado. Klein explained the advantage in terms of solving problems nearby.

He called the manufacturers “an extension of our team.” If something went wrong, Rachio could drive to Loveland and address it. That proximity belonged in the calculation alongside manufacturing and shipping costs. A cheaper part is easy to admire on a spreadsheet. A difficult production problem has a way of demanding a more personal introduction.

The same period found him thinking beyond the homeowner. Utilities and irrigation professionals had their own reasons to care about demand, maintenance and access to customers. A controller sat at a useful intersection: someone owned the yard, someone supplied the water, and someone might install or repair the equipment. Klein wanted those relationships to work together.

There were other kinds of collaboration, too. For Rachio 3, the company worked with design firm Bresslergroup. Klein appeared with designer Mathieu Turpault in a 2021 episode of America by Design. Their segment addressed usability and sustainability, including reducing parts and keeping production in the United States. The small box on the wall had quite a few people behind it.

The installation counts, too

In June 2021, Kim Sentovich became Rachio’s CEO, and Klein shifted to chief product officer. By February 2023, he was discussing that product work in detail. His attention in an irrigation trade interview was on watching customers use the product. The company wanted to understand what they actually did with its controllers, and which features they embraced.

The Wi-Fi connection was a particular concern. Getting a controller online should not require a procession of support contacts and router resets. For homeowners, that is frustration. For contractors, a troublesome setup also consumes time that could have been spent elsewhere. A product’s practical value starts accumulating, or leaking away, before the first watering schedule runs.

There is something revealing about that focus. The memorable origin is a wet walk. The ongoing work includes observing an installation and making it less annoying. Both concern the same human tendency: people have other things to do. A device that asks for repeated attention competes with the rest of their day, however sensible its purpose.

In April 2023, Klein joined The Grass Guys podcast to discuss Rachio’s controllers and the technology behind them. The conversation’s subject was still recognizably the one that had drawn him into the business: helping people use water more efficiently through equipment they could put to work at home.

A yard with more connections

Klein’s product thinking expanded beyond replacing a single controller. In answers published by Rachio, he described working with other hardware makers, including WeatherFlow and K-Rain. The yard contained several systems, and improvements in one could affect another. Changing a nozzle, for example, changes the watering time required.

That made integration a practical matter. Rachio’s app could account for selected K-Rain nozzles when setting watering runtimes. Its Valve Monitoring feature checked for electrical problems in sprinkler valves and alerted users to malfunctions. These are modest-sounding details. Anyone who has discovered that a garden was receiving less water than expected can appreciate the appeal of an earlier warning.

In a January 2024 trade feature, Klein discussed connecting weather-station information through the cloud with hose-timer valves. Individual devices could act as zones, coordinated by software. Running them in sequence offered a way to organize watering without requiring each device to communicate directly with every other one. The yard was becoming a collection of cooperating parts.

The cumulative number puts the small decisions in perspective. In April 2024, Rachio reported that its community had saved more than 200 billion gallons of water. Rain skips, watering adjustments and monitoring contributed to the company’s account of that progress. A skipped run is hardly a spectacle. Repeated across a customer base, it becomes a figure a business can point to.

A new owner, the same weather

Rain Bird announced the acquisition on October 1, 2025. Rachio would become a wholly owned subsidiary, continuing under Klein. The buyer brought a long history in irrigation; Rachio brought connected controllers, a hose timer and a newly announced lighting control product.

Klein’s stated ambition for the combination included more sustainable water and lighting products while preserving the culture Rachio had developed. The company told customers it would operate as an independent division and continue updating its app. The announcement described continuity alongside the prospect of a broader range of outdoor products.

Ownership had changed. The product brief still had an unusually plain test: does this make looking after the yard easier, and does the watering respond to what is happening outside? Those questions connect the founder at a startup weekend with the executive leading a subsidiary years later. They also leave plenty of work between a promising demonstration and a dependable installation.

Klein’s first observation required no special equipment. He looked at a wet neighborhood and noticed machines behaving as though the weather had failed to arrive. The equipment had been given a time to start. He helped give it more to think about. Somewhere between a forecast and a valve, there was room for better judgment.