Tim DraperFounder and Managing Partne, Draper Associate · I back the ideas that look crazy first

Everyone wants to detect fires... and very few can predict what happens next 🔥

24 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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A fire-detection platform uses data from 35,000 community contributors to feed a premium model combining satellite imagery, weather, and topography. The system detects fires faster and predicts fire behavior, but relies on existing satellite and camera hardware rather than proprietary sensors.

You're not the first person to come to me who detect fires. How are you going to rise above the rest of them?
What we do is we have a lot of users, more than 35,000 users, giving us data on validating real wildfires. So we have a premium model where we have all that data that is coming to our models. We increase the resolution of the satellite imagery, combine it with that data, combine it with weather, and topography data. And in that integral solution is that we are able to detect fire faster, monitor them, and predict their behavior.
Are these sensors yours from your company?
No, that's our differentiator. We are software-based, so we connect to satellites, we connect to cameras, but we don't give them. So basically companies that have the hardware, we just connect to those cameras. We can connect to almost any camera. And if not, we help with partners that install those— that hardware for them.