David Rubinstein runs a company most people will never think about, doing a job that quietly touches every street that floods and every pond that fills after a storm. As CEO of OptiRTC - the Boston-area firm most people just call Opti - he has spent the past several years convincing cities, utilities, and developers that the smartest thing they can do with their aging stormwater infrastructure is not to pour more concrete, but to give what they already own a brain.
Opti's product is a cloud platform for what the company calls Continuous Monitoring and Adaptive Control, or CMAC. In plain terms, it lets a retention pond or an underground storage tank watch the weather, read live sensor data, and decide on its own when to hold water back and when to release it. A storm is coming? The system can draw the pond down ahead of time to make room. The rain has passed? It can meter the outflow so a downstream creek does not get slammed. Today that software sits on more than 150 deployments across North America and actively manages north of 90 million gallons of storage. It is infrastructure that reacts, run by a man whose resume, at first glance, has nothing to do with water.
The time is now for the stormwater industry to accelerate the adoption of digital technology solutions.
David Rubinstein, CEO, OptiRTC
A tech operator's unlikely second act
Rubinstein's career reads like a tour of the last forty years of American software. He held senior executive roles at DataXu, the Boston advertising-technology company, and before that at Resolve Technology and Invoke Solutions. Earlier still, he helped lead Convergent Group all the way to a public offering and then through its sale to Schlumberger. These are not water companies. They are SaaS and data businesses, the kind where success is measured in dashboards, sales cycles, and the slow art of scaling something from a promising idea into a repeatable machine.
That background is exactly the point. When Rubinstein joined Opti as President and Chief Operating Officer in January 2018, the company was still largely an engineering-services consultancy - talented people solving stormwater problems one custom project at a time. Within a year he was named CEO, succeeding founder Marcus Quigley, and the mandate was clear: turn the billable-hours business into a product business. It is one of the harder pivots in technology, and it rarely looks dramatic from the outside. A consultancy sells hours. A software company sells outcomes. Getting from one to the other means rebuilding how a company prices, ships, and supports what it makes.
Why software instead of concrete
The traditional answer to stormwater has always been physical: bigger pipes, deeper basins, more gray infrastructure poured and forgotten. It works, but it is expensive, slow to permit, and static. A basin built for the storms of 1990 does not adapt to the storms of 2026. Rubinstein's bet at Opti is that the cheapest new capacity a city can find is the capacity it already owns - if only that capacity could be operated intelligently. Turning a passive pond into an active, controllable asset can unlock storage that would otherwise sit idle, and it can do so without breaking ground.
There is a neat symmetry to a former ad-tech executive making this argument. Real-time bidding and real-time flow control are not as different as they sound. Both take a flood of live data, run it against a forecast, and make an automated decision in the moment about what to do with a scarce resource. Rubinstein spent years optimizing one. Now he is optimizing the other, and the stakes - flooding, water quality, the health of downstream watersheds - are considerably more tangible than a click-through rate.
How CMAC works
Continuous Monitoring and Adaptive Control turns ordinary, passive stormwater assets into responsive ones.
From the single pond to the whole watershed
One of the ideas Rubinstein returns to is the shift from managing a single site to coordinating an entire watershed. A pond that empties itself before a storm is useful. A network of ponds, tanks, and controls that coordinate across a watershed - each making room at the right moment so the system as a whole absorbs the shock - is something closer to a nervous system for a city's water. That vision is harder to sell and slower to build, because it runs into the realities that make water the longest sales cycle in tech: public procurement, regulatory approval, and the understandable caution of utilities that cannot afford to get flooding wrong.
The Opti platform is providing enormous economic benefits to its clients and quality outcomes for our environment.
David Rubinstein
The organizer instinct
Rubinstein studied Management with Computer Science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, a combination that put him at the seam between the technical and the commercial from the start - and it is a seam he has worked his entire career. At WPI he was also elected Student Body President, an early version of the same instinct he now applies to companies and, increasingly, to watersheds: taking a complicated system full of competing interests and getting it to move in one direction. Opti's own culture, as the company describes it, leans on that spirit - daring to challenge convention, caring about the environment, and delivering through accountability.
He inherited that mission from a founder, which is its own kind of leadership test. Marcus Quigley built Opti around a technical vision; Rubinstein's job was to take that vision and make it scale without losing what made it worth building. The backing has helped make the case credible - Opti has counted Sidewalk Labs among its investors and Microsoft among its technology partners, signals that the intersection of cloud software and physical infrastructure is more than a niche. But the harder work is the unglamorous kind: proving, deployment by deployment, that a pond with software behind it outperforms a pond without.
A quiet corner of climate tech
Climate technology tends to get framed in moonshot terms - fusion, direct air capture, the big swings. Rubinstein's version is smaller and stranger, and maybe more immediately useful: a retention pond that knows a storm is coming and quietly makes room for it. Nobody grows up dreaming about stormwater. It is the least glamorous plumbing in any city, invisible until the day it fails. That invisibility may be exactly why it appealed to an operator who has spent a career finding value in markets other people overlook. The best market, as more than one founder has learned, is often the one hiding in plain sight.
What David Rubinstein is really selling is a change in how cities think about the infrastructure they already have. Not rip it out. Not rebuild it. Make it smarter, make it responsive, and let software squeeze more resilience out of the concrete that is already in the ground. For a warming climate throwing heavier and less predictable storms at aging systems, that is a pragmatic proposition - and a fitting last act for someone who has spent forty years teaching companies, and now watersheds, how to grow up.