These high-tech wildfire fighting drones were just backed by a $60 million investment

"On a recent weekday in Aspen, Colorado, Stu Landesberg stood with a group of firefighters on a mountainside and watched a drone take off and fly toward a simulated fire. The drone detected the "hotspot"-a pile of ice, since wildfire risk was too high that day for real flames-and then aimed and blasted it with fire suppressant. The test flight was one of thousands that Landesberg's startup, Seneca, has run while operating in stealth mode over the last several months."

""I looked around at the problems that were enormous-planetary scale," he says. That list included wildfires, a challenge that he was intimately familiar with as a Californian. As fires have dramatically increased in recent years, he lost fire insurance on his own house. The wildfire crisis keeps growing. Fires are now burning eight times more land in the West each year than they did in the mid-1980s."

Seneca operates autonomous drones that detect hotspots and apply fire suppressant during tests in Aspen. The company emerged from months of stealth operations and announced $60 million in funding at launch. Founder Stu Landesberg pivoted from consumer-packaging leadership to address escalating wildfire threats after personal insurance losses and family fire experiences. Wildfires now burn eight times more land annually in the West than in the mid-1980s, with 4.3 million acres burning in California in 2020. Rising insurance costs and insurer withdrawals strain mortgages and community resilience. Seneca aims to reshape rapid wildfire response and protect fire-prone communities at scale.

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