This founder cracked firefighting — now he’s creating an AI gold mine

This founder cracked firefighting — now he’s creating an AI gold mine

Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t sound like somebody who’s disrupted an business that has remained largely unchanged since the Nineteen Sixties. His company builds fireplace nozzles — particularly, nozzles that it says enhance suppression charges by as much as 300% while conserving 67% of water. But Sethi is matter-of-fact about this achievement, more centered on what’s next than what’s already been achieved. And what’s next sounds loads greater than fireplace nozzles.

His path to firefighting doesn’t observe a tidy narrative. After nabbing his PhD at the University of Akron, the place he researched surfaces and adhesion, he based ADAP Nanotech, an outfit that developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and received Air Force Research Lab grants. Next, at SunPower, he developed new supplies and processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. When he landed next at a company called TE Connectivity, he labored on devices with new adhesive formulations to allow quicker manufacturing in the automotive business.

Then got here a challenge from his spouse. The two had moved from Ohio to the East Bay outdoors San Francisco in 2013. A few years later got here the Thomas Fire — the only megafire they’d ever see, they thought. Then got here the Camp Fire, then the Napa-Sonoma fires. The breaking point got here in 2019. Sethi was touring during evacuation warnings while his spouse was dwelling alone with their then three-year-old daughter, no household close by, dealing with a possible evacuation order. “She was really mad at me,” Sethi remembers. “She’s like, ‘Dude, you need to fix this, otherwise you’re not a real scientist.’”

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

In June 2020, he based HEN Technologies (for high-efficiency nozzles) in close by Hayward. With National Science Foundation funding, he carried out computational fluid dynamics research, analyzing how water suppresses fireplace and the way wind impacts it. The result: 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 same circulation fee, he says, however HEN’s sample and velocity management maintain the stream coherent while conventional nozzles disperse.

But the nozzle is just the starting — what Sethi calls “the muscle on the ground.” HEN has since expanded into displays, valves, overhead sprinklers, and stress devices, and is launching a flow-control device (“Stream IQ”) and discharge management methods this yr. According to Sethi, each device accommodates custom-designed circuit boards with sensors and computing energy — 23 different designs that flip dumb {hardware} into good, linked tools, 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 real innovation is the system these devices create. HEN’s platform makes use of sensors at the pump to behave as a digital sensor in 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 circumstances had been.

Why it issues: Fire departments can run out of water in any other case, because there’s no communication between water suppliers and firefighters. It occurred in the Palisades Fire. It occurred in the Oakland Fire a long time earlier. When two engines are linked to 1 hydrant, stress variations can imply that one engine out of the blue will get nothing as a hearth 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 usage calculations with their very own utility monitoring methods to optimize useful resource allocation, that’s a large win.

So HEN constructed a cloud platform with application layers, which Sethi likens to what Adobe did with cloud infrastructure. Think Individual à la carte methods for fireplace captains, battalion chiefs, and incident commanders. HEN’s system has climate data; it has GPS in all devices. It can warn those on the entrance strains that the wind is about to shift and so they’d better transfer their engines, or that a specific fireplace truck is operating out of water.

The Department of Homeland Security has been asking for precisely this sort of system by way of its NERIS program, which is an initiative to deliver predictive analytics to emergency operations. “But you can’t have [predictive analytics] unless you have good quality data,” Sethi notes. “You can’t have good quality data unless you have the right hardware.”

HEN isn’t monetizing that data yet. It’s implementing data nodes, placing devices in as many methods as doable, constructing the data pipeline, creating the data lake. Next yr, says Sethi, it should start commercializing the application 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 hardest part of building this company is that this market is tough because it’s a B2C play when you think of convincing the customers to buy, but the procurement cycle is B2B,” he explains. “So you have to really make a product that resonates with people — with the end user — but you still have to go through government purchasing cycles, and we have cracked both of those.”

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

HEN has competitors, after all. IDEX Corp, a public company, sells hoses, nozzles, and displays. Software corporations like Central Square serve fireplace departments. A Miami company, First Due, which sells software to public security companies, announced a large $355 million round last August.  But no company is “doing exactly what we are trying to do,” insists Sethi.

Still, Sethi says that the constraint isn’t demand — it’s scaling fast sufficient. HEN serves the Marine Corps, US Army bases, Naval atomic labs, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Defense, and ships to 22 nations. It works by way of 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 navy and authorities companies to purchase).

Fire departments purchase about 20,000 new engines each yr to switch getting old tools in a national fleet of 200,000, so as soon as HEN is certified, it turns into recurring income (is the concept), and because the {hardware} generates data, income continues between buy cycles.

HEN’s twin purpose has required constructing a really particular team. Its software lead was previously a senior director who helped build Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. Other members of HEN’s 50-person team embrace a former NASA engineer and veterans from Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. “If you ask me technical questions, I would not be able to answer everything,” Sethi admits with fun, “but I have such good teams that [it] has been a blessing.”

Indeed, it’s the software that hints at the place this will get fascinating, because while HEN is promoting nozzles, it’s amassing one thing more worthwhile: data. Highly particular, real-world data about how water behaves under stress, how circulation 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 data from bodily methods under excessive circumstances. You can’t train AI about physics by way of simulations alone. You want what HEN collects with every deployment.

Sethi received’t elaborate, however he is aware of what he’s sitting on. Companies training robotics and predictive physics engines would pay handsomely for this sort of real-world physics data.

Investors see it, too. Last month, HEN closed a $20 million Series A round, plus $2 million in enterprise debt from Silicon Valley Bank. O’Neil Strategic Capital led the financing, with NSFO, Tanas Capital, and z21 Ventures taking part. The round introduced the company’s complete funding to more than $30 million.

Sethi, meanwhile, is already trying ahead. He says the company will return to fundraising in the second quarter of this yr. 

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