In the end, the fire did not cut off access to the road, but the experience stuck with him. He learned a wildfire threatened to cut across the six-mile access road leading up to his house. Clerico said he started paying closer attention to the wildfire problem in 2019 when he was set to take his family from their San Francisco home to their second house in rural Mendocino County north of San Francisco. It was co-founded by Bill Clerico, who founded the payments app WePay which sold for a reported $400 million to JPMorgan in 2017. Gridware is one of several portfolio companies for Convective Capital, a venture capital firm specifically focused on wildfires. Forest Service who has been researching forest fire management for more than 20 years, “that fire management is more a social than a technological problem.” “I would suggest,” said Dave Calkin, a researcher for the U.S. As vast sums are spent and new technologies are developed, a central issue is a refusal to act on evidence that old technologies provide a basis for a far more viable and proven method for preventing catastrophic wildfires. Wildfire experts are in unanimous agreement this is not only a key reason why the wildfire problem has gotten out of control, but also a contributing factor to declining biological diversity and drought conditions as overgrowth sucks up water before it reaches creeks and rivers. Among these are proven technological processes, such as intentional, prescribed burnings in forests across the western United States, that we’ve abandoned in the last century. But the history of technological innovation is far more vast, encompassing time-tested methods for altering humanity’s environment in a way that eases the strain on the natural environment rather than exacerbating it. These companies take a narrow view of what technology is-computers and chips, cameras and algorithms, the internet and telecommunications-and how it can make our lives better and solve problems. And it spans many, many different things.” “I think it's a symptom or an outcome of core problems. I think that this is a mistake, because I don't think wildfire is the problem,” Barat said. “What I discovered is a lot of focus on wildfire being a problem. The slogan is now “Protecting the grid today, preparing the grid for tomorrow.”Ĭompanies like Gridware are making the argument they can reduce the number of catastrophic wildfires through technology-products or services they can sell to utilities, insurance companies, or large landowners like governments or forestry companies that use internet-connected devices, supply chain management, and artificial intelligence to detect wildfires before they burn out of control. “We were leveraging the urgency of wildfires,” he told Motherboard. Until last year, the company’s slogan was “Creating a future where suburban wildfires are a thing of the past,” but Barat says they changed it after expanding into markets where wildfires aren’t a concern. The idea is that with this information, utility companies can act proactively to prevent a fire from starting. Gridware sells devices that attach to electrical utility boxes so that utility companies can tell what condition their wires, poles, and transformers are in. He saw a market finally ready to take wildfire prevention seriously. He started Gridware in 2020 after moving to California in the 2010s and attending UC Berkeley. A native Australian, he remembers Black Saturday in February 2009, when a heat wave and high winds resulted in hundreds of brush fires, ultimately killing 173 people. These companies come from traditional Silicon Valley backgrounds and often have origin stories that date to between 2017 to 2020, when the founders or their loved ones personally experienced the effect of wildfires.įor his part, Barat’s story is slightly different. Gridware is part of a rapidly increasing segment of the tech industry specifically focused on wildfires.
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