Corporate America Enters the Wildfire War

The fight against wildfires has long been the domain of start-ups and technologists. Corporate America is now weighing in.

In January, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), Lockheed Martin, Salesforce, and Wells Fargo launched Emberpoint, a joint venture that will deploy AI, autonomous systems, and smart fire-suppression technology to detect ignitions earlier and improve firefighting coordination.

PG&E’s CEO, Patricia Poppe, speaking on a recent earnings call, called the partnership “a critical milestone in our mission to end catastrophic wildfires” that would set “a new standard of wildfire safety.”

Details on the joint venture remain scant. Climate Proof contacted all four partners; each declined to elaborate beyond Emberpoint’s initial press release, and messages to Emberpoint’s listed email address went unanswered by press time.

There are procedural hurdles to overcome before the venture can fully take shape. Notably, PG&E’s contributions are subject to the approval of its regulator, the California Public Utilities Commission. Integrating the various systems provided by each of the participants is expected to take some time, too. Even so, the January press release said the group is targeting demonstrations of its firefighting capabilities later this year — and its ambitions are substantial.

Beyond serving first responders and firefighters, Emberpoint is positioning itself as a shared infrastructure play, one that could give public agencies and utilities access to advanced technology without requiring each to foot the bill alone. Poppe framed the overall goal as deploying technology at scale, at the lowest societal cost, as quickly as possible.

If it can live up to the hype, Emberpoint has the potential to level-up public and private entities’ firefighting capabilities at a time when runaway blazes are causing up to US$893bn in economic losses in the US each year.

“Emberpoint is an interesting signal about how seriously large institutions are starting to take wildfire risk,” says Kat Mañalac, Partner at Convective Capital — a wildfire tech investor. “Utilities, insurers, governments, and communities are all exposed, which is why you’re starting to see collaborations that span aerospace, software, finance, and energy,” she adds.

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The joint venture arrives as interest in wildfire technology is peaking. Venture deal count for wildfire mitigation start-ups came to 83 last year, up from 66 in 2024 and just seven in 2020, according to JP Morgan. Notable raises last year include a US$44mn Series B for Pano AI, a US$48mn Series A for Frontline Wildfire Defense, and a US$3.5mn seed round for Sonic Fire Tech.

This rush of capital reflects rising wildfire liability costs that are hitting utilities particularly hard. PG&E itself had US$2.3bn of wildfire-related recovery costs outstanding as of end-December. Against this backdrop, utilities are pumping millions of dollars into asset hardening, vegetation clearing, and ignition response. These efforts are capital and labor intensive, though, creating an opening for the faster, smarter alternatives promised by fire-tech companies.

Two start-ups, Technosylva and Pano AI, have emerged as major beneficiaries of this trend. Both were cited by executives at Xcel Energy — the US$50bn market-cap utility — during its fourth-quarter earnings call as examples of its wildfire mitigation investments. The focus is understandable: last September, Xcel agreed to pay US$640mn to victims of the 2021 Marshall Fire in Colorado, which plaintiffs allege was ignited by the company's equipment.

However, demand for comprehensive wildfire-fighting solutions remains far from satisfied. Effective response requires interlocking technologies across the full arc of a fire event — early detection, spread modeling, resource deployment, and suppression. That gap is what Emberpoint is built to fill.

“What you’re seeing with Emberpoint is indicative of what we’re just starting to see in this [fire-tech] industry, because people are starting to see the magnitude of the problem,” says Bryan Spear, CEO of Technosylva. “That’s getting the attention of other companies, and we need that… We need the big guys with nearly unlimited resources, like the Lockheeds and Salesforces. So this is a great thing for the industry. Nobody can do it alone,” he adds.

Spear is practicing what he preaches. In early February, Technosylva and Pano AI announced a partnership that embeds Pano’s smoke-detection and incident intelligence directly into Technosylva's wildfire modeling software — and routes Technosylva’s simulations and projections into Pano's incident management platform.

“We’re both working with the same customers — fire agencies and utilities. We get fire data from multiple sources, but Pano is detecting it in more real time. When Pano can detect a fire, it automatically now will go into our tool, and within seconds, we’ve run simulations on that fire to say where it’s going to go, we do all the basic metrics around the initial attack assessment, all those things that end up in the hands of the first responders in a matter of seconds,” says Spear.

Arvind Satyam, Co-Founder at Pano AI, told Climate Proof that tie-ups like these are vital given the dizzying array of capabilities necessary to provide a holistic fire detection and response solution. Ignition detection illustrates the challenge: space-based and remote sensors can spot an emerging blaze, but ground-level sensors and drones are needed to confirm it and filter out false positives.

This makes for a more collaborative than confrontational tech ecosystem, where new entrants like Emberpoint are welcomed. The unusually deep tech stack is one reason. The sheer scale of the wildfire challenge is another. “From our perspective, it reinforces a broader point: the resilience market is enormous and still largely underserved,” says Mañalac at Convective Capital.

Another driver of capital and entrepreneurship into this space are the customers — particularly the utilities. These are massive, complex entities with sprawling operational footprints that have a huge appetite for wildfire tech. PG&E has 109,000 circuit miles of distribution lines, 59 transmission and distribution substations, and 601 distribution substations. Xcel has 20,000 miles of transmission lines, and more than 1,200 substations. The resource demands on fire-tech platforms are similarly vast: remote ignition detection alone must cover potentially thousands of square miles to be useful to the largest power providers.

The physical act of firefighting adds another layer of complexity. Start-ups are making inroads with drone-powered suppression systems and autonomous aircraft, but scaling those fleets — and the web of software underpinning them — demands time and significant capital.

That context helps explain the logic of the Emberpoint venture. Lockheed Martin brings high-tech capabilities in space and ground-based sensing and autonomous air and land systems, capabilities it appears eager to expand. On its most recent earnings call, James Taiclet, the company’s CEO, talked about an “AI-enabled unmanned helicopter technology” that could be deployed for “wildfire fighting without putting pilots and aircrews at risk.” 

End-to-end wildfire management is the ideal that Emberpoint is striving for. But utilities want more. Fire is not the only climate-related peril they face, after all. Severe storms have been hammering power providers for decades, and costs are spiraling. Floods and drought conditions are also risk factors.

Addressing multiple perils in one platform is the holy grail, here, and one Technosylva is eager to realize. “The big change that we’re seeing now… specifically in utilities, is the move towards bringing [wildfire, storm and operations teams] together into a single organization. And what we’re giving them the ability to do now is to look at the risk of all hazards together. That’s what we’re investing very heavily in,” says Spear.

For now, the wildfire challenge is enough for Emberpoint to be getting on with. But it is unlikely to be the last venture of its kind. “We expect to see a lot more partnerships like this as resilience becomes a strategic priority for governments, utilities, insurers, and investors,” says Mañalac.

Thanks for reading!

Louie Woodall
Editor