ReGen 🤝 BurnBot

ReGen partners with BurnBot to prevent catastrophic wildfire

ReGen Ventures is thrilled to lead BurnBot’s $20.5m Series A round with participation from Lowercarbon Capital, Toyota Ventures, AmFam Ventures, Convective Capital, Blue Forest Asset Management, Skip Capital, Overture Ventures, and Pathbreaker Ventures. 

Why It Matters

Unstoppable mega fires are killing people, destroying property and accelerating climate change across the globe, and they are only getting worse as the world warms. In a fragile feedback loop catastrophic wildfires release huge levels of greenhouse gases, warming the planet and thereby creating drier, hotter, more flammable conditions for even worse fires. Of the 10 deadliest fires on record in the U.S., four have happened in the past six years. 

Close to 100 million people in the U.S. live in neighborhoods that border undeveloped land in what’s called the wildland-urban interface (WUI); these vegetation corridors are both a source of ignition and a high fire risk. Congress estimates that climate-exacerbated wildfires cost the U.S. between $394 billion and $893 billion each year in damages. Smoke from uncontrolled wildfires kills 340,000 people per year across the globe. 

What Should We Do?

A recent Stanford study found that low-intensity wildfires such as prescribed burns can reduce the risk of catastrophic wildfires by 60%+ over a six year period. This builds on Indigenous knowledge around fires that naturally cleared fuel and encouraged native regeneration. 

We need to scale these low-intensity prescribed burns to reduce the fuel load available to burn (in California alone, the native forests now have vegetation that is 5x denser than 100 years ago due to complete fire suppression), however, this is difficult due to cost, labor shortages, risks from fire escape and smoke, and an extremely short weather window to operate in. As a result, in 2020 California treated only 11,399 acres of their 100,000 acre goal and well short of the 20 million acres that they are required to treat.

Enter BurnBot’s Fire Breathing Robots!

BurnBot’s mission is to scale ‘good fire’ that aims to reduce fuel loads and create barriers that prevent catastrophic mega-fires. They deliver safe, smoke-free prescribed burning options 10x to 100x more efficiently than existing solutions. BurnBot’s range of technology can operate in any weather conditions (as opposed to the limited ~45 day current burn window) and acts as a huge multiplier to a limited labor force. 

The BurnBot team can deliver a range of services including forest thinning, controlled burning and blacklining, and aerial ignition using drones. In the forestry space, the BurnBot team uses a combination of the above techniques to reduce fuel loads in strategic locations to prevent mega-fires. Here they are amplifying existing prescription burn programs while addressing a key bottleneck in the limited number of trained firefighters available to support these burns. 

BurnBot can also operate in areas where ‘good fire’ is not possible today. Because they are able to capture the smoke produced while burning, they can operate alongside critical infrastructure. BurnBot is working with CalTrans to replace expensive and harmful herbicides used for vegetation management alongside highways with smoke-free prescription burning. They’ve also partnered with utility PG&E using controlled burns to reduce risk and protect assets such as power lines and substations. 

BurnBot is also building partnerships with insurance companies to better protect homeowners from the risk of fire while also reducing their insurance premiums. BurnBot’s minimally invasive smoke-free prescribed burns can be used to create a barrier around homes and communities that improve defenses against wildfires.

The Visionary Pragmatists Making This Possible

BurnBot was founded in 2022 by Anukool Lakhina and Dr. Lee Haddad. Anukool previously founded Guavas, one of the pioneers of real-time big data analytics, which was acquired by Thales in 2017. He has a PhD in Computer Science from Boston University. Lee has a PhD in Physics and after starting his career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, built industrial and agricultural equipment at Vermeer Corporation. Along with their team (where nearly half are former hotshots and fire practitioners), they are extremely passionate about using technology to reduce the risk of wildfires globally. 

You can read more about the raise in BurnBot’s blog post or press release, and see the technology in action at BurnBot.com.