The BetaKit Guide: Wildfire
In June 2023, more than 900 wildfires were burning across Canada, filling the air with smoke and tinting the sky orange. By season’s end, 18 million hectares had burned in blazes spreading faster than crews could contain them.
But two years later, one thing is spreading far more slowly than wildfire: funding for the technology meant to stop it.
“Canada should be leading and developing the wildfire tech solutions that we need here at home, but also that the world needs.”
Sarah Goodman, NorthX Climate Tech
“We’ve got hundreds of VCs looking at cleantech, and one in North America specifically targeting wildfire tech,” said Sarah Goodman, CEO of NorthX Climate Tech (formerly the BC Centre for Innovation and Clean Energy). “We think this is an untapped area.”
For prevention and mitigation of wildfires to work at scale, Goodman believes that communities need better tools. The good news is that a wave of Canadian startups is stepping up to build them.
Despite the scale of the need, wildfire tech does not fit neatly into existing venture funding categories.
Wildfire tech companies often develop hardtech—drones, towers, and integrated systems—that require extensive field testing, long development timelines, and coordination with public-sector buyers. This makes them costly to build and difficult to validate quickly.
Wildfire tech is too early-stage for infrastructure-scale investors, but too asset-heavy for seed-stage VCs looking for clean cap tables and 18-month exits.
“The VC model tends to like quick-return, software-related deals,” Goodman said. “But companies building wildfire hard tech, and climate hard tech in general, can take years to develop and validate.”
Even so, a growing handful of Canadian wildfire technology startups have started to attract meaningful investment. One of the largest deals came in 2023, when Toronto-based Flash Forest raised $11.4 million CAD in a Series A round to expand its drone-enabled reforestation work.
Vancouver’s SenseNet, which uses camera, sensor, and satellite data to detect smoke and ignition in real time, raised $1.3 million in 2023 through TiE Vancouver’s angel network. Others in the space are self-funding while they test products in the field.
In total, Canadian wildfire tech ventures have raised tens of millions of dollars over the past five years, far below levels seen in adjacent sectors like solar, battery storage, or carbon removal. Many companies remain grant-funded or bootstrapped.
To help address this funding gap, NorthX launched a wildfire tech innovation challenge in 2024. The organization received 73 applications in the first round, from companies that included Crwn.ai, a Kelowna, BC-based startup identifying transmission line defects that may spark wildfires, and Hummingbird Drones, which identifies hotspots, and assesses the efficacy of prescribed burns.
Through the program, NorthX awarded $3.5 million in non-dilutive capital to six BC-based wildfire startups in 2024. In recent years, other funding bodies like Sustainable Development Technology Canada, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Canadian Space Agency have also stepped into the space with project-specific grants.
In the US, San Francisco-based Convective Capital launched in 2023 explicitly to fund firetech, and has already backed more than 50 companies around the world.
“Two years ago, wildfire technology was just not really a thing, and now it feels like there’s a group of companies, some funding, and some momentum,” Convective Capital founder Bill Clerico told Politico last year.
There are other early signs of a shift. A 2024 State of Climate Tech report by PwC found that while overall climate investment was down, interest in adaptation was on the rise, with wildfire resilience among the fastest-growing subcategories.
The growing cost of wildfires, including the recent devastation in Los Angeles, has started to push the tech higher on investor radars, and Goodman believes Canadian startups are well-positioned to meet the moment.
“We’ve got a lot of experience in wildfires in Canada, excellence in forest management and Indigenous knowledge, and also a great cleantech sector,” she said. “When you put all those ingredients together, Canada should be leading and developing the wildfire tech solutions that we need here at home, but also that the world needs.”
What’s needed most, she argues, is patient, non-dilutive capital that understands the complexity of building wildfire technology.
Goodman believes the market “tends to reward those that solve huge problems,” but the opportunity now is for Canada to build the investment infrastructure that supports them.
“One of the challenges with climate change is there is a sense of powerlessness,” Goodman added. “And by leveraging our strengths, we can start to take back that power and be part of the solution.”
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