The Denver Guy Who Watched Sprinklers Run in the Rain - and Built a $22M Water Company

In October 2012, Chris Klein was walking his dog through his Denver neighborhood during a rainstorm. Colorado was in a drought. And nearly every automatic sprinkler on the block was running anyway - dumping treated municipal water onto grass that was already getting soaked from above. It is the kind of thing most people notice, shrug at, and forget by the next block. Klein did not forget.

That small absurdity - machines watering the lawn in the rain - became Rachio, the smart irrigation company Klein founded in 2012 with Franz Garsombke and Matthew Reisman. The premise was almost too simple to fund: a sprinkler controller that reads the weather forecast and refuses to water when it does not need to. Thirteen years later, that idea has a number attached to it - more than 150 billion gallons of water saved - and a new owner in irrigation giant Rain Bird.

What it actually does

01A sprinkler that checks the forecast

Rachio makes Wi-Fi-connected controllers that replace the beige plastic timer box bolted to the wall of your garage - the one you set once in April and never touch again. The flagship Rachio 3 installs in about half an hour, wires into your existing sprinkler zones, and then does the thing the old box never could: it pulls hyper-local weather data and adjusts. Rain in the forecast? It skips the cycle. Freeze warning? Wind that would blow half the spray onto the driveway? It holds off. Rachio calls the features Rain Skip, Freeze Skip, Wind Skip and Seasonal Shift. Homeowners mostly call it "I stopped thinking about my sprinklers."

The EPA estimates up to 50% of the water used outdoors is wasted - runoff, evaporation, overwatering, and watering things that do not need it. Rachio's entire product thesis is reclaiming that wasted half. The controllers are EPA WaterSense certified and are commonly associated with roughly 30% outdoor water savings versus a conventional timer.

The scale of the number

02What 150 billion gallons looks like

Water savings are hard to picture, so Rachio has done the math for you. The 150 billion gallons its community had saved by its 2023 decade anniversary is more than a full year's supply of drinking water for the entire United States - with some left over. It is also roughly a week of Niagara Falls flowing at full volume. The milestones stacked up steadily: 29 billion gallons by 2018, 50 billion by 2022, 150 billion by 2023 as the installed base compounded.

Cumulative gallons of water saved by the Rachio community, self-reported at milestone dates.

Who buys it

03The homeowner, the installer, and the water utility

Rachio's core customer is the U.S. homeowner with an in-ground sprinkler system and a slight guilt complex about their water bill. But the business is smarter than a single buyer, because it stacks three parties who all want the same outcome. The homeowner wants a lower bill and a greener lawn. The planet wants less waste. And the local water utility - facing drought restrictions and conservation targets - wants people using less. So utilities across the country mail rebates to residents who install WaterSense-certified controllers like Rachio, sometimes covering a large chunk of the price.

That is the quiet genius of the model: the customer, the mission, and the government are aligned. Nobody is asked to sacrifice. You install a box, your lawn looks better, and a rebate check shows up. Professional installers and landscapers form a second channel, buying and specifying Rachio for clients, while the free Rachio app keeps everyone in the ecosystem and nudges the next purchase.

The product line

04From "Iro" to the whole yard

The first product, launched in 2014, was called Iro - a Wi-Fi controller that automatically tuned watering to the weather. It won design awards and, more importantly, worked. The line matured into the Gen 2 and then the Rachio 3 in 2018, sold in 8-zone and 16-zone versions for larger properties. In 2023 the company stepped off the garage wall entirely with the Smart Hose Timer: a battery-powered valve and Wi-Fi hub that screws onto an outdoor faucet, bringing app-controlled, rain-aware watering to drip lines, container gardens and anyone without an in-ground system. One hub runs up to eight valves.

More recently Rachio moved into Matter-compatible smart outdoor lighting and accessories, plus a line of certified refurbished controllers for buyers who want the savings at a lower entry price. The through-line across every product is the same single sentence the company started with: don't spend the resource you don't need to spend.

Money and the exit

05$22M raised, then Rain Bird calls

Rachio was never a blitzscaling story. It raised roughly $22 million across its life - a seed round with early backers including 500 Startups, then a 2015 Series A led by Arborview Capital with participation from Amazon's Alexa Fund, one of that fund's early smart-home hardware bets. For a hardware company competing on retail shelves against much larger names, staying capital-efficient was the strategy, not a consolation.

Then, on October 1, 2025, the outcome: Rain Bird - the irrigation company founded in 1933, with more than 4,000 products and 4,000 employees - acquired Rachio. Terms were not disclosed. Rachio became a wholly owned subsidiary, continuing under Chris Klein as CEO. It is a familiar trade in hardware: the century-old giant had the manufacturing, distribution and dealer network; the 31-person startup had the software, the weather intelligence, and a homeowner who actually trusted an app. Each bought what it could not easily build.

The competitive field

06How it stands apart

Smart irrigation is a real category now, and Rachio is not alone in it. Orbit's B-hyve competes hard on price, Hunter's Hydrawise owns much of the professional-installer world, and RainMachine, Netro and others chase the DIY buyer. Rachio's edge has been the combination that is hard to copy at once: a genuinely simple DIY install, a polished app, deep smart-home integrations (Alexa, Google Home, IFTTT, Matter), and a brand that homeowners associate specifically with water conservation rather than just automation. The irony of the 2025 acquisition is that its biggest legacy competitor, Rain Bird, decided the faster path was to own it.

The road here

07Thirteen years, one idea

There is a lesson in here for anyone building. Klein did not invent irrigation, and he did not invent weather forecasts. He noticed that a dumb machine was doing something obviously wasteful, added the one thing it lacked - awareness - and then did that single unglamorous job better than anyone for more than a decade. No pivot, no reinvention. Just a sprinkler that learned to check the sky first.