Los Angeles has a long way to go before city and state officials can start looking for lessons to take away from these fires. Likely topics of discussion will include building resilient structures,
vegetation management, and community preparedness. But there are also some more out of the box solutions coming from a growing number of technology companies — “firetech” startups, if you will — that are putting new, high-tech spins on some of these familiar solutions.
BurnBot, for instance, makes a remotely operated machine that executes efficient controlled burns to help mitigate wildfire risk. “I don't think you can ever replace the talent and the expertise and the know-how of the front line [firefighters],” Anukool Lakhina, CEO of BurnBot, told me this week. “But what you can do is make their job safer.”
Last August
I wrote about Convective Capital, the venture capital firm exclusively focused on funding wildfire solutions, and one of its portfolio companies, Rhizome, which makes an AI-powered wildfire risk mitigation platform for utilities. Here are five more notable companies in Convective’s portfolio that will hopefully help bring wildfire prevention and mitigation into the future.
1. Gridware
On January 8, as flames began to encircle Los Angeles, Gridware announced its $26.4 million Series A funding round. The company uses sensors placed on power poles to provide continuous monitoring of grid infrastructure and can alert grid operators to hazards and faults in realtime. This allows for rapid repairs and immediate response to wildfire threats such as equipment failure, downed lines, or any contact with vegetation. And because Gridware’s devices operate on solar power, they can remain online even during a power outage.
“Our country depends on the electric grid, yet until now, utilities have been operating it without reasonable monitoring capabilities,” said Bryan Schreier, a partner at Sequoia Capital, which led Gridware’s Series A, in a statement about the funding round. Utility-caused wildfires tend to be particularly damaging, as they often occur near populated areas. And though California utilities spend over $6 million annually on risk mitigation, most of that goes towards older technologies, something Gridware hopes to change.
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Gridware implemented a
successful pilot with PG&E last year, and has since expanded to monitoring over 1,000 miles of power lines for 18 different customers, with devices installed on about 10,000 poles.
2. BurnBot
As mentioned above,
BurnBot deploys robots that can chop up vegetation and conduct controlled burns in a wide variety of geographies, from densely treed forests to shrubbery near urban environments. Traditionally, controlled burns are only safe to do in very particular weather conditions, but because BurnBot captures the smoke from its operations and immediately extinguishes the fires after vegetation is removed, Lakhina told me the robots can operate in all weather.
“Today, a lot of the predominant way that fuel treatment is done, regrettably, is extremely archaic. It's humans with matches setting things on fire, or humans with shovels and spades that go and dig the vegetation.” Some estimates calculate that the U.S. has about 200 million acres of land that need to be treated for wildfire risk, and “you're not going to get there relying only on humans or only on grazing,” Lakhina said. He estimates that the company’s robots can treat 40 times the area of a typical hand crew.
BurnBot has piloted its tech with
CalFire, PG&E, and the U.S. Forest Service, and raised a
$20 million Series A funding round last year.
3. Fire Aside
Fire Aside makes software products that help fire departments and other safety agencies to digitize their inspections processes, thereby ensuring that homes and businesses are complying with fire safety requirements and helping to scale state and community wildfire prevention programs.
“It enhances the reach of municipal fire departments so that they can, at scale, communicate with their neighborhoods and their communities, and automate and digitize these inspections,” Jay Ribakove, principal at Convective Capital, told me. That’s certainly a step up from the traditional method, which involves “a firefighter showing up and leaving you with some handwritten notes on what you can do better,” Ribakove said. Residents in communities that use Fire Aside are five times more likely to take actions to protect their property against wildfire, the company says.
Fire Aside raised a seed round of undisclosed size in 2023, led by Convective Capital.
4. Pano
Early fire detection is one of the most critical factors in keeping blazes under control. Pano is a software company that relies on artificial intelligence and computer vision to automatically detect when and where a wildfire is breaking out. The company mounts its cameras on telecommunications towers, poles, or other equipment, which, combined with other inputs like satellite data, field sensors, and emergency alerts, gives fire professionals and first responders a unified view of any developing situation.
“The sooner that we can detect fires, the faster we can respond,” Ribakove told me,
citing research that indicates that if wildfire response times in California were just 15 minutes quicker, the frequency of large, out-of-control fires could be reduced by at least 3% and as much as 7%. Given that California has experienced, on average, $117 billion in total annual economic losses from wildfires from 2017 to 2021, tech like Pano’s could save it as much as $8.2 billion per year.
Pano raised a $20 million Series A round in 2022 and a $17 million growth round in 2023.
5. Overstory
Overstory has another approach to minimizing the presence of fire fuels, providing utilities with a “global vegetation management platform” that applies artificial intelligence to satellite imagery, allowing the company to identify the location, size, health, and species of any tree in the world. With this data, Overstory can then help utilities identify particular areas where vegetation might pose a wildfire risk, such as by growing too close to a power line, and recommend specific actions. Overstory also hopes its tech will save utilities money, as vegetation management budgets have ballooned in recent years.
Overstory works with more than 40 utilities, including PG&E, along with others in Canada, Brazil, and Europe. At the time of its $14 million Series A round, in 2023, the company said that it monitored about 2 million acres and protected about $6 billion in utility assets.
