Megan Glover

Megan Glover did not come from water, and for a long time she thought that was her biggest problem. She spent more than a decade as a marketing and sales executive in enterprise software, the unglamorous business-to-business world of martech, SaaS and demand generation across half a dozen industries, none of them water. Then, in late 2015, the Flint, Michigan crisis landed, and like a lot of people she suddenly wanted to know what was actually coming out of her own tap. So she called her water department and asked if she could test her water, the answer was more complicated than it should have been, and as she puts it, water found me. That phone call is the whole origin of 120Water.

Megan Glover co-founded 120Water in 2016, and the thing to understand is that it is a software company that happens to live in water. In her own framing it is a digital water platform made of three pieces: cloud-based software, point-of-use sampling kits, and the services that wrap around them, all of it sold to the government agencies, public water systems and facilities that have to run drinking-water compliance programs. Lead is the headline parameter, the one the law cares most about, but it sits inside hundreds of water-quality measures a utility has to track every single day, and 120Water's pitch is to put that whole messy, paper-driven job onto one screen.

Megan Glover almost built the wrong company first. 120Water launched thinking it would be a direct-to-consumer business, the at-home test kit you order for your own tap, and what the team found instead was that the real, paying, urgent need sat on the other side of the meter, with the utilities and governments legally on the hook for everyone's water. So they pivoted to business-to-government, and here is where her outsider status flipped from liability to advantage, letting her bring software-industry habits, the communications module, the data science, the customer-experience-first instinct, into a sector she describes as unusually black-box and closed off.

Megan Glover can point to a number that makes the mission concrete, because the first big 120Water project was testing for lead in schools across the entire state of Indiana, and as she tells it, the company sent over 500,000 children back to school with safer drinking water. That kind of traction is what pulled in the capital. 120Water has raised $57.5 million in total, and the round that mattered most was a $43 million growth investment led by Edison Partners in January 2024, what Glover only half-jokingly called the $43 million elephant in the room. The timing was not an accident, because the US EPA's Lead and Copper Rule Improvements were forcing every utility in the country to catalogue and test its lead service lines, and the EPA reckons there are roughly 9.2 million of those lines out there, which is a public-health problem and a multi-billion-dollar compliance market sitting in exactly the same sentence.

Megan Glover's larger bet is that the technology a flagship utility like Denver Water uses should reach all the way down to the smallest systems, and that matters because 85% of the US water market is rural, the long tail of tiny utilities that usually get this kind of software last or never. Everyone deserves the technology that Denver Water uses, is how she frames the democratizing mission. Glover ran 120Water as CEO for nearly a decade and then, in mid-2025, handed the chief-executive seat to Casey Myers and stepped back into a founder role, which is the part most water founders never get to, building the thing, scaling it, and choosing the moment to let someone else drive.

“I felt like an outsider, and I really, really truly felt like an outsider. But I can say now, almost 10 years in, it is precisely that outside experience that is allowing us to bring these capabilities to the water sector, because I lived them in previous lives through various software-as-a-service companies.”

Glover is, in the end, the proof of a slightly uncomfortable idea for an insider industry: that the person who fixes your sector's worst paperwork problem might be the one who never worked in it, and walked in asking the obvious question nobody had software for.