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Dryad is already working with Vodafone Spain – and others – to install its IoT systems in forests
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The CEO said the company is working on a series B funding
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The company is also planning a moonshot that could see it start to install fire-fighting autonomous drones with its detection systems
A glow turns into a blaze at the edge of a forest. The flames speedily reach a group of outbuildings, then rip into a cluster of family homes, leaving in its wake smoldering houses, charred possessions and shattered lives.
This is the very real fear of wildfires. Just in the United States, the National Interagency Fire Center reported that – as of late May – seven large fires are burning 35,413 acres in four states with big blazes currently going in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico.
“Since January 1, 14,641 wildfires have burned 1,883,689 acres,” the center said.
This is a problem around the globe. There recently have been major blazes in British Columbia and Chile, while Europe is likely to suffer more as the summer comes on.
So what can be done?
There are multiple startups dedicated to detecting wildfires, hopefully before they start. Using everything from sensors to satellites, these companies hope to prevent the devastating effects of these fires before they even get going.
One of these is Eberswalde, Germany-based Dryad Networks, which uses gas-based Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to provide very early detection of fires. These small sensors use the LoRaWAN radios that connect over license-free sub-gigahertz radio frequency bands – there many across the world – in a mesh configuration to cover distances of thousands of square kilometers.
The small solar-powered sensors, which can be mounted on trees, link back to border gateways that connect to the internet via a 4G LTE hookup
"We now have 50 deployments worldwide,” CEO Carsten Brinkschulte said in an interview.
Vodafone in Spain is one of the major operators working with the startup. “Vodafone in Spain is really kicking the tires for us,” he said. The CEO noted that Dryad has a reseller agreement with Vodafone Spain and has already done several deployments in the country.
Brinkschulte noted that Canadian operator Telus has invested in Dryad. “Canada will become important to us from an operator perspective,” he said.
“There is clearly interest by operators in what we do,” he said. “What we do is create an internet of trees ... We create an extension of the 4G network into areas where it’s not cost effective to roll out 3GPP-based networks.”
Some operators, he noted, wanted Dryad to use cellular narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) to extend 4G networks out into the forest. “We could build a sensor using narrowband for sure, but then we wouldn’t be able to get any coverage out in the forest. So what’s the point?” Brinkschulte asked. He noted that the LoRaWAN sensors and border gateways were also cheap to buy and install.
Brinkschulte said the company is planning to enable a EchoStar satellite connection in its 3rd generation gateway later this year. This should enable the fire detection network to connect to the cloud in areas where providers have difficulty getting a 4G LTE link for the border gateways even at the edge of a forest or wooded area. A satellite link should remove that concern.
The company is still exclusively using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its cloud connectivity.
Dryad has raised a tranche of venture funding for its wildfire project. It pulled in $10.5 million Euros ($11.37 million) in series A funding in August 2022 and a convertible financing round of 5.6 million Euros ($6 million) this March. The CEO said that Dryad is planning to close its series B funding later this year.
The CEO said that the company is trying to add more applications to its “internet of trees” package, such as allowing the system to detect various metrics that are present in the forest. These include gunshot detection and chain detection, for warding off illegal logging.
Brinkschulte also was excited about a “moonshot” that has just been approved and will take around three years to build. As well as detecting wildfires, the company is aiming to have some way to put them out before they become a devastating fire.
To this end, Dryad is building an autonomous drone that can be summoned out of a hangar when a fire is detected. The drone would then drop water onto the sparks that mark the start of a growing blaze.