Franco's startup Satellites on Fire uses AI and satellite imagery to detect wildfires hours before NASA. Last quarter they helped tackle roughly 400 wildfires and reached 35,000 users. The system combines frequent satellite data with tower cameras to spot fires minutes after they start.
Chapters
What we do is we combine both technologies, but also on a software-based strategy that makes us faster, more scalable, and 100% focused on AI, enabling us to detect fires several hours faster than NASA, which is the most used system in Latin America, and helped tackle more than 400 wildfires in just the last quarter. And we are backed by Techstars, MIT, the United Nations, the founder of Reddit, and Draper Cygnus BC. We're not just detecting wildfires, we are preventing disasters.
So my mother told me she knew I would never finish university because I'm super curious. I like to learn a lot of things from gymnastics to making magic tricks in parks at 11 years old, to bartender, surfing, acting, everything. When the project on Satellites on Fire started to grow, I really wanted to spend the next years being on my mission to try to preserve the forest biodiversity and the people that live in our world. So at the beginning, it was because we wanted to do something with satellite imagery, AI, and I had family friends losing their homes. So it not only affects the forest that I was really connected to, it saves people's lives. We were in a technical high school where every year you had to do like a technical project. We started developing for 4 months the solution, and after that we started with the people who work with wildfires, and we saw that the solution wasn't useful for anybody. After that, we started speaking with hundreds of firefighters, forest rangers, and experts to try to understand why these fires weren't being stopped in time. And that's when we started developing what nowadays is Satellites on Fire. Today, organizations in Latin America use NASA's system, which often is delayed by several hours or even days. And that's why basically we are combining several types of technology like satellites, cameras, and towers So we can detect the fires in the first few minutes. In the northern parts of Argentina, wildfires are a huge problem, having wildfires every month of the year. And 95% of the wildfires in Latin America are generated by humans. In the State of Mexico last year, we have been able to reduce to zero the mortality rate of fire brigades because of giving them more information on how the fire was I think it's difficult. We will depend also on climate change because if climate change keeps getting worse, wildfires will keep getting worse, and the technologies that we will have to develop will have to always evolve to be on that kind of world that we will be living in. Usually 5 minutes before going to pitch, my heart starts pumping really hard. But once I start speaking, I think the nerves goes off.
In 2020, when I was 16 years old, I saw the tragedy of family friends losing their homes to wildfires in Argentina. I had to do something. So I spent months speaking with firefighters, forest rangers, and experts trying to understand why these fires weren't being stopped in time. The key?
Early detection.
And we built Satellites on Fire, which is a deforestation and wildfire early alert system that combines satellite imagery every 5 minutes, tower-mounted cameras, and proprietary AI models, helping organizations save their lands, their biodiversity, and their people. Today, companies in Europe are launching satellites to detect fires. In the US, Latin America, and South Africa are installing cameras for the same purpose. What we do is we combine both technologies, but also on a software-based strategy that makes us faster, more scalable, and 100% focused on AI, enabling us to detect fires several hours faster than NASA, which is the most used system in Latin America, and helped tackle more than 400 wildfires in just the last quarter. And we are backed by Techstars, MIT, the United Nations, the founder of Reddit, and Draper Cygnus VC. We're not just detecting wildfires. We are preventing disasters.
This is really close to home. My daughter and her husband and their 3 kids all live— lived in Los Angeles. Her office burned down and everything burned around her school and around her house. The whole neighborhood was burned and they now live with us.
I got surprised to hear that, but I think that personal connection that I had of family friends losing their homes is something that connected us in our pitch.
You're not the first person to come to me There are a lot of companies who detect fires. How are you going to rise above the rest of them?
Sorry to hear that.
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 freemium 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. 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.
By my calculations, you're about 20 or 21 years old.
21.
How do we know you're that one?
I am super curious, as I suppose any entrepreneur.
I have done lots of things from gold medal in gymnastics to gold medal in math Olympics.
But I really— Whoa.
Casual.
Of course.
Well, Franco, thank you so much for being on Meet the Drapers.
Thank you.
Nice to meet you. Oh, wait a second. Can you do like some like acrobatic thing here?
