Seneca raises $60M to deploy autonomous firefighting drones for wildfire suppression

from Senica in the Reream waiting room. Let's bring in Stuart. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

Welcome. Doing great. Thanks for having me.

Uh great for joining us.

Uh we're we are both excited for this one. Uh we uh

we hate fire and we love water.

Fire. We love water. Uh we uh I live in Malibu, John lives in Pasadena. Beginning of this year was super chaotic. Fortunately, our homes didn't burn down. Um, but we had a crazy start to the year and we're looking uh and excited to see more companies working in the space. So, it's great to meet.

Yeah, I would love to for you to kick off with an introduction on yourself and the company and uh and then we can get into the news.

Sure. Well, thanks thanks for having me and um sorry for you and for all the folks who live in Southern California about what happened earlier this year. I think, you know, it's a it's a story we've heard too many times in California and that's a big part of why I'm here and why Senica exists. You know, I've spent the last decade and a half as an entrepreneur and doing doing other things in technology, but over the last few years, it's become, I think, increasingly apparent that building physical things that can solve real world problems is we we need more entrepreneurs like doing this kind of stuff and maybe fewer people building I don't know the the things that are fast to generate financial returns but lower.

Exactly.

Exactly. slot machine, the trough.

Yes. Uh where are you on the farm? You're you're helping put out the fires on the farm, right?

We're big into farming analogies. Anyway, uh give us the news. What happened?

So, started this company, started working on it about a year and a half ago, doing research, doing ride alongs with fire agencies, and was amazed at the quality of individuals that we have in the fire service and amazed that most of these people are doing their jobs. And remember, these are people who literally run into burning buildings. They're doing their job with technology that is in many cases from the 60s and 70s, right? It's it's for people

before that. When did we invent the hose?

Probably hundreds of years ago.

We invented buckets and hoses. And that that's still, you know, key to the to the fight.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah. It's amazing. And so you look at what we give to the war fighter, right? the other people who we rely on to keep our communities safe.

And then you realize that that aerial attack which is so necessary, right? And you saw in the Palisades and in Paradise, right? You couldn't get aircraft up in the air how bad that was still largely using man helicopters on platforms from the 60s and 70s that cost tens of millions of dollars. And we all know what's possible in autonomous aviation. So you put those two together and it became really clear there was an opportunity to solve one of the biggest problems in fire which is how do you get to the fire before it becomes too big.

So put together a good team announced yesterday that we' raised $60 million uh in startup capital.

Appreciate the gong looking forward to that moment.

Raymond deserved

caffeinated capital. Let's I want to get into the specifics of the early product and kind of how you're thinking about um obviously wildfires are a big problem. You can't solve everything to do with them, but uh you know why why dronebased system and kind of where where's the early focus?

So when I when I first looked at the problem, I assumed that we would go structure by structure. But when you talk to folks who are really deep, two things become clear. The first is almost no structure is safe if you have a fire like the palisades, right? The the flame lengths are too long. It's just too dangerous. The second thing is the holy grail of fire is really how do you get to fires before they become big. And a lot of times these fires start in places where it's like windy roads. They're not near a fire station. They're up in the wildland. And so the only way to get there is through the air. And so then you say, okay, well, what we did, we built a fire model and said, what's a 5% risk fire? How quickly would you need to get there? How much suppression payload would you need to carry? And do the physics work? And once we got convinced the physics worked, we're like, well, do the economics work? And the the answer in both questions is absolutely. So we fly small fleets of autonomous suppression copters, as we call them, and they carry about 500 lb per trip. Um, they sort of like can go round and round and round, load and refill from an engine. And the goal is to there a lot of use cases, but the best is to stop an incident before it becomes something like the Palisades.

Yeah. I don't know if you know the story of the the of the Anderole firefighting tank. Are you familiar with this? One of the first projects they worked on was an autonomous tank that would fight fires. And apparently they ran into a ton of uh push back from firefighting communities that said uh this is job displacement. We're worried about that. How have you framed this technology as like uh fitting in and augmenting the firefighter as opposed to replacing them?

So I think Andrew does better than anyone. Understand that the job is not to replace the war fighter but to give them superpowers their market copy. Our specific philosophy statement is to build advanced technology to support firefighters in situations that were previously unsafe, inefficient or impossible.

Right? And so we think about all the utility lines out there. It is literally impossible today

to be able to get to those quickly. And so you need technology to do that. You talk to firefighters today like, "Okay, there's a start on the ridge." You know, you're joking about like buckets and but literally they're hiking up in the heat with backpacks that have like a couple of gallons of water and an axe.

This tool called a pilaski. It's like half axe, hacks, half shovel.

Yeah.

And so we're not we're not trying to prevent those guys from getting up there. We're just trying to make sure that if you've got an aircraft that you can take off instantly, by the time those folks get there, hopefully there's something that's under control enough

that that they'll be able to do their jobs.

Yeah.

Are are you guys focused on are you guys focused on detection at all? Cuz I mean, when I when I think about like Malibu specifically, it's the area that I've obviously spent more time thinking about than any other area with wildfire risk. It's like you have homes basically around PCH and then you have all this wildland up in the mountains that nobody's around. So like theoretically a fire could start or you know could start on an electrical due to an electrical electrical line falling. But how do you actually like how does the discovery of uh of a a fire happen so that you guys can bring the response? There's a lot of good work that's gone on in detection. There's satellite based detection. There's sensors. There's cameras. There's people with cell phones. So, the detection problem, it's not solved, but it's getting there. The big challenge is that it can take you 30 minutes to 60 120. Sometimes it takes days to get to a fire if it's really inaccessible. And at that point, it can be too late. So, we're really trying to fill that gap between, okay, detection is is a problem that we sort of know how to solve. Fast response is something where there's only one solution. There is no solution today and that's that's really where we exist to stop and I will say you know a situation like Palisades the difference in getting there from like you know 1 minute to 20 minutes fire growth is exponential right it could be 100x

yeah how how do you think about uh uh making the drones fireproof I remember watching videos of like those huge it look like 747s like dumping like tons of fire retardant and it and and it feels like they actually don't really need to fly through smoke but Do you need to harden the system or can you kind of use off-the-shelf componentry? Well, there's a fire truck pulling in right behind you.

Real background.

That's a great background right now.

Yeah, you time this up perfectly. Uh but yeah, uh yeah, just hardening for for heat, smoke. Is that relevant or can you just fly above it and it's not a problem?

So, yes, it's relevant number one. And number two, if you go out and test on the field with firefighters, you can see it in this video.

You got to be really careful, right? If you put a helicopter above a fire,

you're going to put a lot more air on the fire. And anyone who's ever blown on a campfire

Oh, yeah. That's crazy.

More air does to a fire. So, if you want to build a drone based system, we built a we built a proprietary

got to be super lightweight because you're flying with it. Super high pressure pump. Okay. Like a water cannon. Yeah. that that sprays foam and we spray it out of the rotor wash so it can go 40 50 feet from the air and hits the fire with pretty good precision.

Yeah.

So anyway, that's um that's like one of the core design elements. You end up having to deal with smoke and obstacle avoidance and it turns out that some of the like IR stuff and it can get tricky, but in practice,

yeah,

you know, hopefully if you're doing your job, you're in and out relatively quickly.

Yeah. What about what about uh wind wind conditions? I'm sure you've tested it in a range of, you know, different conditions.

That was the big problem with the Palisades fire was there was so much wind all that week. It was crazy.

Wind is is going to make any fire hard when it comes to aerial response. Just always like should start by acknowledging that.

Yeah.

That said, the risk profile when you've got a $30 million helicopter with two firefighter pilots in it versus a couple hundred,000 piece of hardware that's autonomous. I mean, they're not on the same level, right? So,

where you you have to have a 99.999% chance of success in one mission,

you know, could you take a risk in higher winds with a robot? I absolutely the first thing. The second thing I'd say, if you look at our aircraft, right, a lot of drones are sort of agnostic about front and back. The whole thing is meant to be super aerodynamic. We have about 100 acres in Soma. That's our test range. And you know when we fly up there, wind blows 30, wind blows 40. Sometimes wind blows more than that. Aircraft dead stable in the air. Doesn't mean that we're going to recommend it for 40, 50 mph winds.

But we absolutely think hard about you. This is valuable a lot of the times, but it's most valuable when literally nothing else will do the job.

Yeah.

Okay. Last crazy sci-fi idea for me because I've spent a bunch of time thinking about this. So, uh, I get like a small discount on my fire insurance because I have good fire sprinklers in my home, like a modern system.

Uh, and the home uh, that I own previously before I owned it burned to the ground because a single tiny ember had like flown and gotten caught in the roof in this one area and nobody was around. So, the house burned down even though there wasn't like a wildfire in the in the neighborhood.

Yeah. And so I was thinking at some point, and I'm sure you've thought about this, I'm curious how you think about it. You could just have a drone-based system that effectively had a fire extinguisher attached to it that would just monitor your property if there were wildfire conditions. Why why or why not is that a a terrible idea?

DOC instead of B.

Yeah. Where like I would go to Senica and be like, "Okay, I I want to buy one of your drones and park it on my roof so that if there's a fire and I have to evacuate, it will monitor

the property." We're hiring on the sales team. Do you want

I love it

in another in another life.

Yeah. The the one of the really big challenges everyone understands, right? 90% of structure loss is ember driven, which are for those who don't, it's like a little spark that's floating in the wind from house to house basically. And aerial suppression is the best way to get those because they often hit the roof. Also an obvious comment,

but you're really limited in terms of air resources. The Senica systems are made to be stationed remotely. So, if you're part of a community that's in a high-risisk area and you say, "Hey, I want to think about how do I defend my community?" We're not meant to defend house by house, right? That's that's the wrong way to do it. If your neighbor's house is ripping, you know, it's going to be hard for even the best systems in the world to keep your home safe. But if you can protect the whole community, that has real promise. And so, the systems are built to be able to be up in the air. It's relatively easy with an IR camera to spot like a tiny start on the gutter and the roof, whatever, right? gets caught in these little mesh pockets or in the side of a deck. It's really easy to spot those. And then, you know, class A foam is not exactly, which is what we shoot. It's not exactly what's in a fire extinguisher.

Sure.

But it rhymes.

Yeah.

So, absolutely, we think about structured defense just like all the firefighters do, right? This is a core part of how we make sure that wildfires, you know, don't don't prevent us from living in the American West, right? We have to have to be able to protect our communities from fire. Well, thank you