Every movement starts with a drop.
Ours was a drop no one could find.
We didn’t set out to build another smart device. We set out to fix something that had been broken for decades – how buildings manage water.
The name.
Why Watergate?
Because we’re a company that stops leaks. The name does what it says on the tin.
Because water waste is a scandal – billions of litres lost every year, and most of it preventable. If that’s not a Watergate, what is?
And because nobody else dared use it. So we trademarked it.
The call that changed everything.
In 2015, our founder Krystian Zajac was running a smart home company, installing connected tech in high-end UK properties – motorised swimming pool floors, panic rooms pretending to be home cinemas, automated lighting, the lot.
Then a major insurer rang. They’d seen a leak sensor on the company’s website and wanted a conversation.
That call revealed something surprising: water leaks were causing more property damage than fires and theft combined. And nobody -not the plumbing industry, not the tech industry, not anyone – had built a proper answer.
Buildings were getting smarter everywhere except water.
No business plan. No whiteboard. Just one phone call that reframed everything. Within months, Krystian’s team had a working prototype.
Neos – proving it could work.
Before Watergate could exist, the idea needed proving at scale. In early 2016, Krystian co-founded Neos – probably the world’s first home insurance company that gave away smart tech as part of the policy, stopping incidents before they became claims.
The thesis was validated: prevention beats reaction, and the data proves it. Aviva later acquired the company in 2018.
The turning point.
By that point, Krystian’s focus had already shifted back to the original idea. When he left Neos, the IP for the prototype came with him. The device that would become Sonic was back in his hands. The unfinished project was back on the table.
The hard years.
What followed was messy, slow, and occasionally brutal.
COVID hit. Promising partnerships fell through. The project nearly died more than once.
But the problem Watergate was built to solve wasn’t going away. If anything, it was getting worse.
In 2024, Watergate finally reached the market, nine years after that first call.
The thesis still holds.
Since launch, things have moved fast. Major accounts. Rapid growth. A growing role in shaping water regulations. New products, including our Server – the control unit that turns a single device into a building-wide water management system.
But speed isn’t the point. The point is that the thesis from that 2015 phone call has held up: buildings need a circuit breaker for water, and nobody else has built one properly.
The people who keep showing up.
Here’s something we don’t talk about enough. A large part of the Watergate team has worked with Krystian before – some since Neos, some since the smart home days before that. Through different companies, different challenges, and a few near-death experiences.
They didn’t follow a brand. They followed a mission. And when Watergate finally launched, they were already here.
That kind of loyalty isn’t recruited. It’s earned.
We’re not plumbers. That’s the point.
Watergate wasn’t built by the water industry. It was built by software developers, smart home engineers, data scientists, and people with deep insurance backgrounds – outsiders who looked at how buildings manage water and couldn’t believe what they found.
We don’t come from plumbing. We don’t come from HVAC. We come from a world where devices talk to each other, data drives decisions, and user experience actually matters.
That’s why Watergate doesn’t look, feel, or work like anything the water industry has seen before.
It’s also why a Red Dot Award – the Oscars of industrial design – sits next to a Water Industry Award on the same shelf. Recognised by designers for how it looks. Recognised by the water industry for what it does. We’ll take that.