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Frontline is the latest VC dollar startup with a $6.4 million seed round.
Wildfires and Damage is a growing problem. The US will see more than 66,000 wildfires in 2022 alone, and while many think these natural disasters are mostly a California problem, they will burn across the country, causing millions of dollars in damage.
Harry Stater knows this as his entire career has focused on the intersection of the built world and the effects of nature. In the year In 2012, he was working at a forestry company he founded and decided to research what makes buildings and structures susceptible to wildfires. It found that 90% of structural fires are wind-driven embers that travel seven — and up to 24 — miles from the actual wildfire. He decided to plug it.
“Active prevention, with firefighters being on the property and protecting that structure, you can’t simply scale the number of firefighters to the size of the exposed structures,” Stater told me. “Furthermore, firefighters are there for the safety of life, not for the protection of personal property. They are there to get people out safely during wildfires, not to protect people’s homes.”
Stater founded Frontline, which builds outdoor sprinkler systems that use geospatial software to detect wildfires. If a home is in range, the Frontline software turns on the sprinkler and advises users on what to do next. Within ten years, the company had raised a $6.4 million seed round led by Echelon and started scaling.
“We’re really growing fast and we’ve seen a lot of demand for our technology,” he said. “We’re raising our Series A round because we’re growing so fast.”
But Frontline isn’t meant to be a silver bullet, and there’s still a long way to go before a broader set of technologies is available that can help users reduce the damage caused by fires and better learn to live with them. But the foundation for this change has begun to build.
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