Wildfire tech investor on what comes next
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As the Los Angeles fires continue to burn, Axios spoke with Bill Clerico, former fintech CEO who in 2022 Convective Capital to invest in wildfire tech startups.
What follows is an edited transcrtipt of the conversation:
Q. Are you surprised by what's happened in LA?
"Unfortunately not that surprised. I'm obviously biased, working on wildfire tech, but as a society we haven't taken the steps we need to when living in fire-exposed places."
What needs to be done to prevent a repeat?
"California forests are three times denser than they were 100 years ago, basically from putting out too many wildfires, so we need to do more thinning and prescribed burning.
- Second is rapid detection and suppression. If you can catch them small, it's a way to intervene, although it's hard to say if that would have mattered here. The winds were so strong.
- Third is home and community hardening. California did change its building codes to add wildfire reslience, but many homes were built before then. Plus, one big difference between wildfires and something like hurricanes is how vegetation around homes becomes a major risk factor. You need to enforce ordinances around defensible space and landscape maintenance."
How big is the wildfire tech startup space?
"We've identified around 600 startups [globally]."
What's an area receiving a lot of focus?
"Utilities, because they cause 11% of fire ignitions but 50% of the damage. The high winds that create equipment failures are the same ones that help fires spread.
- For example, we have a portfolio company that helps utilities trim trees around powerlines, one that puts sensors on poles, and one that does risk analysis for utilities."
What types of startups do you want to see more of?
"Drone-based suppression. We still mostly use manned aircraft, which are slower and have more restrictions."
A wildfire camera network in California recently made the first AI-generated detection of a wildfire. Meaningful?
"Yeah, it's a really big success story for the state that should be replicated elsewhere. There are over 1,000 cameras in the network, and we have a portfolio company that helps with this. These cameras can let firefighters know how a fire is actually behaving, as opposed to a 911 call from someone who says they see smoke behind their house."
Final thoughts?
"These are deep-seated systemic and cultural issues that we need to collectively grapple with. So using it to score political points seems counterproductive.
- A lot of the solutions are deeply unpopular: no one wants to pay more for their electric bill or rip out all the landscaping around their house or have a prescribed burn, but those are the things we need to do to solve the problem."
