This founder cracked firefighting - now he is creating an AI gold mine

[ad_1] Sunny Sethi, founding father of HEN Applied sciences, doesn’t sound like somebody who’s disrupted an trade that has remained largely unchanged because the Sixties. His firm builds fireplace nozzles — particularly, nozzles that it says improve suppression charges by as much as 300% whereas conserving 67% of water. However Sethi is matter-of-fact about this achievement, extra centered on what’s subsequent than what’s already been achieved. And what’s subsequent sounds quite a bit greater than fireplace nozzles.

His path to firefighting doesn’t comply with a tidy narrative. After nabbing his PhD on the College of Akron, the place he researched surfaces and adhesion, he based ADAP Nanotech, an outfit that developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and gained Air Drive Analysis Lab grants. Subsequent, at SunPower, he developed new supplies and processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. When he landed subsequent at an organization known as TE Connectivity, he labored on gadgets with new adhesive formulations to allow sooner manufacturing within the automotive trade.

Then got here a problem from his spouse. The 2 had moved from Ohio to the East Bay outdoors San Francisco in 2013. A couple of years later got here the Thomas Fireplace — the one megafire they’d ever see, they thought. Then got here the Camp Fireplace, then the Napa-Sonoma fires. The breaking level got here in 2019. Sethi was touring throughout evacuation warnings whereas his spouse was house alone with their then three-year-old daughter, no household close by, dealing with a possible evacuation order. “She was actually mad at me,” Sethi recollects. “She’s like, ‘Dude, it's essential to repair this, in any other case you’re not an actual scientist.’”

A background spanning nanotechnology, photo voltaic, semiconductors, and automotive had made his pondering “bias free and versatile,” as he places it. He’d seen so many industries, so many various issues. Why not attempt to repair the issue?

In June 2020, he based HEN Applied sciences (for high-efficiency nozzles) in close by Hayward. With Nationwide Science Basis funding, he performed computational fluid dynamics analysis, analyzing how water suppresses fireplace and the way wind impacts it. The outcome: a nozzle that controls droplet dimension exactly, manages velocity in new methods, and resists wind.

In HEN’s comparability video, which Sethi exhibits me over a Zoom name, the distinction is stark. It’s the identical circulate charge, he says, however HEN’s sample and velocity management maintain the stream coherent whereas conventional nozzles disperse.

However the nozzle is only the start — what Sethi calls “the muscle on the bottom.” HEN has since expanded into screens, valves, overhead sprinklers, and stress gadgets, and is launching a flow-control gadget (“Stream IQ”) and discharge management methods this yr. In keeping with Sethi, every gadget comprises custom-designed circuit boards with sensors and computing energy — 23 completely different designs that flip dumb {hardware} into sensible, linked gear, some powered by Nvidia Orion Nano processors. Altogether, says Sethi, HEN has filed 20 patent purposes with half a dozen granted to date.

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The actual innovation is the system these gadgets create. HEN’s platform makes use of sensors on the pump to behave as a digital sensor within the nozzle, monitoring precisely when it’s on, how a lot water flows, and what stress is required. The system captures exactly how a lot water was used for a given fireplace, the way it was used, which hydrant was tapped, and what the climate situations had been.

Why it issues: Fireplace departments can run out of water in any other case, as a result of there’s no communication between water suppliers and firefighters. It occurred within the Palisades Fireplace. It occurred within the Oakland Fireplace many years earlier. When two engines are linked to at least one hydrant, stress variations can imply that one engine abruptly will get nothing as a fireplace continues to develop. In rural America, water tenders, that are tankers shuttling water from distant sources, face their very own logistical nightmares. If they'll combine water utilization calculations with their very own utility monitoring methods to optimize useful resource allocation, that’s an enormous win.

So HEN constructed a cloud platform with software layers, which Sethi likens to what Adobe did with cloud infrastructure. Suppose Particular person à la carte methods for fireplace captains, battalion chiefs, and incident commanders. HEN’s system has climate information; it has GPS in all gadgets. It will probably warn these on the entrance traces that the wind is about to shift they usually’d higher transfer their engines, or {that a} specific fireplace truck is operating out of water.

The Division of Homeland Safety has been asking for precisely this sort of system by its NERIS program, which is an initiative to convey predictive analytics to emergency operations. “However you possibly can’t have [predictive analytics] until you may have good high quality information,” Sethi notes. “You may’t have good high quality information until you may have the correct {hardware}.”

HEN isn’t monetizing that information but. It’s implementing information nodes, placing gadgets in as many methods as potential, constructing the info pipeline, creating the info lake. Subsequent yr, says Sethi, it should begin commercializing the appliance layer with its built-in intelligence.

If constructing a predictive analytics platform for emergency response sounds daunting, Sethi says really promoting it's harder, and he’s proudest of HEN’s traction on that entrance.

“The toughest a part of constructing this firm is that this market is hard as a result of it’s a B2C play whenever you consider convincing the shoppers to purchase, however the procurement cycle is B2B,” he explains. “So it's a must to actually make a product that resonates with folks — with the tip person — however you continue to need to undergo authorities buying cycles, and we have now cracked each of these.”

The numbers bear this out. HEN launched its first merchandise into the market within the second quarter of 2023, lining up 10 fireplace departments and producing $200,000 in income. Then phrase began to unfold. Income hit $1.6 million in 2024, then $5.2 million final yr. This yr, Hen, which at the moment has 1,500 fireplace division clients, is projecting $20 million in income.

HEN has competitors, after all. IDEX Corp, a public firm, sells hoses, nozzles, and screens. Software program corporations like Central Sq. serve fireplace departments. A Miami firm, First Due, which sells software program to public security companies, introduced an enormous $355 million spherical final August. However no firm is “doing precisely what we are attempting to do,” insists Sethi.

Nonetheless, Sethi says that the constraint isn’t demand — it’s scaling quick sufficient. HEN serves the Marine Corps, US Military bases, Naval atomic labs, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Protection, and ships to 22 international locations. It really works by 120 distributors and not too long ago certified for GSA after a year-long vetting course of (that’s a federal seal of approval that makes it simpler for army and authorities companies to purchase).

Fireplace departments purchase about 20,000 new engines annually to interchange getting older gear in a nationwide fleet of 200,000, so as soon as HEN is certified, it turns into recurring income (is the concept), and since the {hardware} generates information, income continues between buy cycles.

HEN’s twin purpose has required constructing a really particular crew. Its software program lead was previously a senior director who helped construct Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. Different members of HEN’s 50-person crew embody a former NASA engineer and veterans from Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. “Should you ask me technical questions, I might not be capable to reply every thing,” Sethi admits with amusing, “however I've such good groups that [it] has been a blessing.”

Certainly, it’s the software program that hints at the place this will get attention-grabbing, as a result of whereas HEN is promoting nozzles, it’s amassing one thing extra beneficial: information. Extremely particular, real-world information about how water behaves below stress, how circulate charges work together with supplies, how fireplace responds to suppression strategies, how physics works in energetic fireplace environments.

It’s precisely what corporations constructing so-called world fashions want. These AI methods that assemble simulated representations of bodily environments to foretell future states require real-world, multimodal information from bodily methods below excessive situations. You may’t educate AI about physics by simulations alone. You want what HEN collects with each deployment.

Sethi gained’t elaborate, however he is aware of what he’s sitting on. Firms coaching robotics and predictive physics engines would pay handsomely for this sort of real-world physics information.

Buyers see it, too. Final month, HEN closed a $20 million Sequence A spherical, plus $2 million in enterprise debt from Silicon Valley Financial institution. O’Neil Strategic Capital led the financing, with NSFO, Tanas Capital, and z21 Ventures taking part. The spherical introduced the corporate’s complete funding to greater than $30 million.