David Lynch

David Lynch did not come to software from a computer-science lab. David Lynch came from the inside of the water sector, and he describes himself, with a straight face, as a "recovering consultant". He studied mechanical and manufacturing engineering in Dublin, then spent his early career working with the Environmental Protection Agency in Ireland on the Water Framework Directive, which is the European law that governs how water is protected and reported on. He even represented Ireland at the European Commission working groups that interpret it, so he learned the compliance pain the hard way, from the regulator's side of the table, before he ever tried to sell anyone a fix for it.

David Lynch eventually got tired of selling advice that utilities could not easily act on, and that frustration became Klir. The pitch, in his own words, is that water "operates as one single interconnected system, albeit a system of chaos", and yet no utility manages it that way. So Klir is the layer that ties the pieces together. It plugs into the systems a utility already runs, the SCADA that controls the plant, the telemetry, the lab information systems, the customer billing, the work orders and the mapping, and it gives all of that information one single home. He is blunt that this is software only, not hardware: a water authority does not need a hundred different dashboards, it needs one place where the data actually lives.

David Lynch frames the category as RegTech for water, which is a term borrowed from finance, where "RegTech" means the software banks use to keep up with their regulators. Klir applies the same idea to a sector that is arguably under even more pressure, because utilities are simultaneously more regulated, more operationally constrained and more starved of resources than almost any other industry. Lynch is careful here, because he knows his customers: water is a conservative industry, and he insists it is conservative for good reasons, since you cannot bolt a shiny untested gadget onto the supply of something people drink. Klir is pitched as built for that caution rather than against it.

David Lynch took Klir through Y Combinator (the Silicon Valley startup accelerator that backed Airbnb and Stripe early), in the winter 2020 batch, and he credits it with one habit above all: build a big microphone, listen hard to what users actually need, then ship and iterate fast. That discipline shows up in how Klir grew. Lynch points out that on one or two of his fundraises he never even met the investors in person, because the company had proven it could sell remotely on reputation and a deep read of the people who run water systems. As of 2026 Klir has raised $30.2 million across four rounds, the most recent a Series B led by Insight Partners, structured deliberately to keep the company founder and employee controlled.

David Lynch is openly ambitious about where this goes, and it is the most quotable thing he says. He wants Klir to be the "first proper water unicorn", a startup worth more than a billion dollars, not for the trophy, but because he believes the first big water exit unlocks a wave of venture money into a sector that has always struggled to attract it. And he is unusual in saying he would rather take Klir public than sell it, his argument being that a company sitting on this much regulatory data across so many jurisdictions ought to be accountable to a public market rather than owned quietly by whoever writes the biggest cheque. You can hear the regulator he used to be in that answer, which is most of why he is worth listening to.

“For Klir, basically what we say is it's the operating system for water. We know that water operates as one single interconnected system, albeit a system of chaos, but it is one single cycle and one single system. And yet that's not how it is managed today.”