Printing Water, One Lawn at a Time
Shane Dyer has built companies that put IoT inside Whirlpool appliances, Chamberlain garage doors, and Sylvania smart bulbs. His latest obsession is the sprinkler head - arguably the least glamorous thing in a backyard, and demonstrably one of the most wasteful.
Traditional irrigation systems spray water in fixed arcs, indifferent to the actual shape of your lawn. Sidewalks get watered. Driveways get watered. The street gets a courtesy rinse. Nobody designed these systems to be precise - they were designed to be installed, billed, and forgotten. For decades, that was fine. Now, with water rates climbing 33% nationwide since 2010 and residential irrigation accounting for up to half of household water consumption, "fine" is getting expensive.
Dyer, a Stanford computer systems engineer with a taste for overlooked infrastructure problems, spotted the gap. He teamed up with Gary Klinefelter - a veteran of the inkjet printing industry with 35+ patents - and asked a deceptively simple question: what if a sprinkler could deliver water with the same precision as a printer delivers ink?
We're solving an overlooked water tech challenge. Irrigation is one of those industries that hasn't changed in decades.
- Shane Dyer, CEO, IrrigreenThe result is Irrigreen: a system where each digital sprinkler head contains 16 programmable water streams, mapped via software to the exact contours of a lawn. No overspray. No fixed zones. One Irrigreen head can cover 2,000 to 2,800 square feet - terrain that would demand 15 to 20 conventional heads to cover poorly. Five Irrigreen heads can replace a forty-head traditional system.
Three Companies, One Playbook
Dyer's career moves in a specific pattern: identify a market where connected technology hasn't arrived yet, build the platform, then scale. He ran that play twice before Irrigreen.
In 2002, he co-founded Propellerhead Studios, a product development shop building technology for Mattel, Hasbro, and the toy industry. The same year, he started Arrayent - which became one of the more consequential IoT platform companies of the early 2010s, quietly powering the connectivity inside major consumer products long before "smart home" was a marketing category. Under Dyer's leadership, Arrayent built more than 60 connected products with Whirlpool, Chamberlain, and Sylvania among its partners. Arrayent was acquired by Prodea - backed by Intel Capital and DCM - for $37 million.
Gary Klinefelter was watching a sprinkler water a sidewalk. He'd spent a career engineering inkjet printers to deposit liquid with sub-millimeter precision. The irony was hard to ignore.
He brought the idea to Shane Dyer - who had just spent thirteen years building the IoT platform that powered Whirlpool's connected appliances. Between Klinefelter's precision printing patents and Dyer's IoT infrastructure expertise, they had everything needed to redesign the one piece of hardware no one had modernized in fifty years.
They filed eight patents. They iterated. They waited for the technology to match the vision. Irrigreen launched its first commercially viable product in 2021.
The Water Math Nobody Is Doing
Half of residential water use goes to outdoor irrigation. Of that, roughly half is wasted through overspray, evaporation, and the systemic failure of fixed-arc heads to account for the actual shape of a yard. Dyer isn't making incremental improvements to that math - he's replacing the equation entirely.
The company has saved 400 million gallons of water for its customers to date. Scaled to 100,000 homes, Irrigreen projects up to 10 billion gallons in annual savings. The addressable market is 80 million residential lawns in the United States alone.
Irrigreen's AI-powered Smart Controller 3 reads real-time weather data, soil composition, sun exposure, and water pressure, adjusting delivery dynamically. The system launched an AI quoting tool in April 2025 that uses satellite imagery to map a lawn's exact shape and instantly configure the optimal sprinkler arrangement. The work of a landscape contractor, done from a browser in thirty seconds.
Series A, Made in America
In April 2025, Irrigreen closed a $19 million Series A round led by Natural Ventures, with participation from Burnt Island Ventures, Ulu Ventures, MFV Partners, Tamiami, and Sum Ventures. Total funding reached $35.89 million. The capital is earmarked for technology advancement and market expansion - going deeper into the 80 million lawn opportunity.
Irrigreen's Sprinkler 3 is manufactured in Wisconsin, approximately one hour from the engineering headquarters in Edina, Minnesota. Domestic manufacturing at this scale is unusual for smart home hardware companies. Dyer built this intentionally.
The timing of the raise coincided with two product launches: Sprinkler 3, featuring 16 water streams and a patent-pending Auto-Clean mechanism that reduces sediment buildup and extends the product's life, and Smart Controller 3, with dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth setup, and a user-facing screen built directly into the controller box. Both products are part of the Irrigreen 3.0 platform, which Dyer describes as a full AI-powered lawn management system, not just a smarter sprinkler.
How He Hires and Why It Works
Dyer's hiring philosophy is compact: grit over resumes. He's said it plainly in interviews. For a company building deep hardware-software technology with 49 employees and $17.5 million in annual revenue, the team doing the work matters more than the credential stack on their LinkedIn profiles.
In a 2025 episode of Burnt Island Ventures' "The Fundamental Molecule" podcast, Dyer went deep on what it actually takes to build a company in a space where the hardware has to be right the first time it's installed in someone's yard. Rigorous iteration. Verification loops. Customer voice feeding product direction continuously. The same framework he used to build Arrayent into a platform powering tens of millions of connected home devices.
Keep the customer as your North Star.
- Shane Dyer, Burnt Island Ventures Podcast, Episode 34The company has earned two design awards for that discipline: the 2025 Green GOOD DESIGN Sustainability Award and the Good Housekeeping 2026 Home Reno Award. It has also been featured on CBS's Innovation Nation, which covers technologies with demonstrated real-world impact.
The Longer Game
Dyer's trajectory - from toy-industry tech in 2002 to a $37M IoT exit to AI-powered irrigation - traces a straight line through one consistent instinct: find the infrastructure that connects hardware to software, and build it better than anyone thought to bother with.
Residential irrigation was always that problem. Water rates are up. Drought conditions are intensifying. Municipal water utilities are under pressure. The industry's response, until Irrigreen, was mostly to add a weather sensor to an otherwise unchanged mechanical system. Dyer and Klinefelter started from a different premise: what if the spray pattern itself was the problem?
They have 300+ installation partners in nearly every U.S. state. They're manufacturing in Wisconsin. They're running machine learning on satellite images to configure installations. And they've crossed 400 million gallons saved.
One sprinkler head at a time. Delivered with inkjet precision.