There’s a wildfire moving toward your home. It’s blocked your usual highway route out of town. Do you know your back roads well enough to get to safety?
“We like to say in our organization that an unpaved road is one bad storm and 10 logging trucks away from looking completely different than it did before.”
Chris Stewart, IntelliMass
Like many in Western Canada, IntelliMass founders Ryan Gallagher and Chris Stewart don’t have to imagine that stress. They’ve been forced down those back roads before, and even as recently as this month. To them, the biggest issue isn’t that the route could be filled with potholes, debris, and narrow passes; it’s that evacuees simply don’t know what to expect at all.
“We like to say in our organization that an unpaved road is one bad storm and 10 logging trucks away from looking completely different than it did before,” Stewart told BetaKit in a recent interview he andGallagher sat for.
That unpredictability is why they made their first product, BackRoadIntel—a crowdsourced mapping platform that picks up where Google Maps leaves off. Using kinetic sensors in tandem with other vehicle data-collecting devices like dashcams, emergency and local authorities use the platform to catalogue back road conditions to inform evacuation routes.
“You drive a lot of kilometres of back roads; you encounter problems like rock slides, downed trees, a dead animal on the road, washout, or very rough road conditions. And now it’s up to you to do something about it when you get back,” Gallagher said. “That doesn’t always happen, right? And if it does, it’s often uncoordinated.”
With BackRoadIntel, drivers can narrate their back-road journey, commenting on every pothole and dusty area they come across. Once the driver is back in service, the data from the kinetic sensor, dashcam, and their commentary are automatically synced into a fulsome report on the road’s drivability.
“My main focus has been like, ‘this has to be really easy,’” Gallagher said. “This has to be so easy that it just works.”
“A clear need”
The Kelowna, BC-based company has been engaged as a consultant to help plan evacuation routes. It also rents its equipment out to municipal and regional governments to do the same. Right now, local officials can request a BackRoadIntel community evacuation route assessment for just under $5,000, according to its website.
The startup is also looking to provide its services to Indigenous communities, getting its start by sponsoring its own pilot project with the Lytton-area First Nations. The area already has a tragic history with wildfires: back in 2021, Lytton almost entirely burned down in one of Canada’s worst wildfires, killing two people. The local First Nations community is made up of 12 bands and, according to Stewart, around a quarter of those bands only have one road out of their homes in the event of a wildfire.
“Even if there is only one option, you really want to understand what that road is capable of, how it’s holding up, [and] how it’s being deteriorated even by BC wildfire suppression efforts,” Stewart said, adding that the community often doesn’t have the data to prove how much their roads are eroding from wildfire countermeasures.
Wildfires in recent years have burned more Canadian land than ever before. The Canadian National Fire Database reports that more than 34 million hectares of land have burned since 2020; over half of which occurred in 2023. That is double the area burned in the preceding six years. Indigenous populations are being disproportionately affected by this increased burning. In 2023, 42 percent of wildfire evacuations were from communities where more than half the population was Indigenous, according to Statistics Canada.
“There’s a clear need by these groups, and while there are markets that may be more lucrative for us, we can’t see a market that’s more important at this point in time,” Stewart said.
Gallagher said BackRoadIntel is in discussion with “several large brands” in BC to sponsor its efforts to get its equipment into more Indigenous communities, with the hope of creating a “network effect” and increasing the number of back roads authorities have visibility on.
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So far, the founders say their platform covers “well over” 20,000 km, with coverage in areas around Kelowna and Vancouver, as well as some of Vancouver Island, and parts of Alberta. Gallagher said he drove thousands of kilometres on BC back roads himself just to get the dataset started.
All of this has been done bootstrapped, but the founders are now cautiously courting investors to help them scale. Gallagher said they’re trying to raise as little as possible because they feel there is enough demand to scale organically and gain good traction in Canada before raising significant funds. Both he and Gallagher are mindful of finding the right, ideally Canadian, investors to help them scale the product at their pace.
“I think a VC would be like ‘get to enterprise, get to B2B, and get your … product fully fleshed all the way to the biggest fish,’” Stewart added. “We’re cognizant of that path, and we are on that path, [but] building out where our product is making a lot of human interest good, not just profit, is an important place to start our brand.”
A community resource
Just a few weeks after those words left Stewart’s mouth, wildfires forced him to evacuate his home in Summerland. The following day, he used BackRoadIntel to map his route on Forest Service Road 201, and shared the resource in community Facebook groups. In an email after the fact, Gallagher told BetaKit that Stewart received “good feedback and engagement” from the groups.
“I think that our data will begin to show that … what gets measured gets managed. It’s time these roads got managed a bit better.”
While BackRoadIntel is usually in the hands of emergency officials, Stewart’s use of the platform as a communal resource is a preview for what’s next. The company is working with potential sponsors to launch a public-facing community map feature this summer, hopefully in August. The new feature will allow people to collaborate and share road hazards on their routes, potentially increasing the available data on back roads.
“I think people will realize, ‘oh my God, I can have that visibility on my options,’ and it’s going to get their heads turning as to how they [can] get involved,” Stewart said in the interview.
The duo hope that, within the next year, BackRoadIntel will be deployed across Western Canada, but Gallagher said he sees no reason why all of Canada can’t be covered. Stewart also said he has his eyes on at-risk communities in the United States and all over the world that could use this kind of insight on their service roads.
The usefulness of the product doesn’t start and end with the wildfire season, either. Stewart and Gallagher see plenty of utility in the data they’re gathering. Perhaps it could help build a model of how an unpaved road ages, or even contribute to new developments in how back roads are built.
“They’re treated as second-class networks, and we believe they have a lot more value than that,” Stewart said. “I think that our data will begin to show that, as we know, what gets measured gets managed. It’s time these roads got managed a bit better.”
Feature image courtesy Intelllimass.