Pano AI's Wildfire Watch: $37M Raised for AI Detection

0:00In today's episode, I want to talk about a really interesting new product and company in AI that I think is going to make a really positive impact impact. And that specifically is an AI that is helping to detect early signs of forest fires. And in a recent situation was able to call 911 before any humans actually spotted the issue. And so today on the podcast, that's what we're going to be diving into. So all of this comes on the back of a new company called Pano AI. And the reason that I'm also covering this, in addition to the fact that it's, you know, just a really interesting company that's doing some interesting things, is because it has recently closed over a$17 million Series A.

0:41So that's, I think essentially they extended their$20 million Series A with another$17 million. So all in all, they're close to$40 million that they have raised. And this most recent case they have raised comes just on the back of last week when the company was able to send really early warning signs of the Kutch Road fire, which broke out near the Kutch Mountains in Yama County, Oregon. And the company actually was able to show a reporter over at TechCrunch how it was able to detect the fire and issue a warning 14 minutes before the first 911 call, which really just illustrates its value to firefighters, even as the licensing cost per station is around$50 ,000.

1:24So these things are not cheap, but I believe it is a really high-powered solution. so panel ai's ingenious solution how does this you know exactly work how do they break this thing down well essentially it is uh they essentially they're mounting a high definition camera that is remotely controlled and these cameras can either be manually operated by a human or set to a scanning mode where they essentially they just rotate roughly once per minute and ai is then brought in to analyze the video footage that they are taking for any signs of smoke or fire and if anything is detected an alarm is triggered now just due to the fact that you know these things are really remote locations they're scanning footage of massive amounts of area that you really do need like ai is a really key player in this in being able to actually detect smoke and fire because you know from the naked eye it's not always evident what around you know if something around his smoke or something around his fire.

2:25And in the case of, you know, this most recent Kutch fire, right, this was 14 minutes before any humans actually saw any fire and called 911, and they were able to actually detect it. And so I think this is really, I think this is a really powerful technology. And another benefit to this is the fact that cameras monitoring these areas and these locations can be like cameras have the ability to zoom into a really high degree. So you're actually able to monitor quite a large amount of space and land mass with these things and to a very very precise location are you able to kind of detect exactly where a fire is coming from so Sonia Castor that's Pano's CEO breaks down the whole process of how this works they said our network of stations is designed to allow for fires to be seen from at least two stations we've developed a proprietary algorithm to triangulate the fire's location and calculate its latitude and longitude.

3:23This information is crucial and something that a 911 call simply doesn't provide. Caster points out that only about 5 % of 911 calls are actually fires, which means a significant amount of time is spent dispatching trucks to verify these calls. And in my opinion, that's absolutely crazy, the fact that only 5 % are actual fires. So obviously humans can have a lot more, there's a lot more room for a human error than for you know this ai that is has a very very high precision rate in addition i think this is absolutely genius just the fact that um you know their system is double checking um the detected incident is actually a fire before sounding an alert to a you know a fire chief or a fire department for example and i think it's really impressive the way that they're actually triangulating these fires they're able to use ai not just to detect them but also to detect their location which in my opinion is like one of the biggest benefits because a 911 calls like hey I live x y and z location I can see off over to the right somewhere a big fire by the time the you know the firemen actually locate where the fire is exactly based off of that the the blaze could have grown spread and been a little bit out of control whereas in this case if they're able to you know say boom we see a fire starting this is exact location it's very quick to be dispatched and to get that thing under control so I think this is a really clever combination of essentially early detection and high resolution alerts which can provide emergency responders with really accurate information on both the nature and the location of the detected incident and i think essentially this is allowing for resources like helicopters and bulldozers to be deployed in a more timely and precise manner because like we said earlier with only five percent of you know 911 calls being actual fires they got to dispatch someone they got to go check it out they got to make sure it's legit and then they're going to call in and, you know, set up someone to actually come and take care of the situation, which could take quite a long time, especially when these are, you know, in really remote locations.

5:20I personally have, you know, a number of friends that go and fight wildfires, some friends from Canada, some friends from Arizona. This is a big issue, and a lot of these guys are out in the bush in all sorts of weather and all sorts of, you know, terrain, and this isn't, you know, these are not areas that are easily accessible by a car a lot of the time you know sometimes a majority of the time you know you're taking logging roads to find these places you're taking helicopters to find these fires and so the fact that you're able to get that location really precise and really quick is an absolute game changer so i think despite its recent success pano ai's fundraising journey has been pretty challenging caster notes hinting at the downturn in venture capital markets the company decided to aim for less capital in 2023 and prepare for a larger round next year and the recent series a extension that it closed suggests that the markets might be on the mend so you know originally they did 20 million and they were going to do a little bit later but then they were able to go and add this additional 19 million and caster said wildfires aren't slowing down and this additional capital means we don't have to slow down either so in this extension round they're adding 17 million, which is slightly higher than the previous year's$20 million.

6:37But, you know, essentially they're adding it on to last year's Series A. So my assumption is that they're doing it at the same terms if it's just an extension of that round, meaning the valuation may not have actually increased for the company. Although I'm not sure if that's a hard set rule, but I have seen that before. Valor Equity Partners led this round with T-Mobile Ventures and Salesforce coming on board as strategic investors now this is really interesting for someone like salesforce to come in on a fire spotting um company and i think this is really cool because like first off this isn't yeah this isn't super relatable to salesforce but perhaps salesforce sees a play here for um fire departments or fire supplies selling to them i'm not sure in any case salesforce coming on is obviously happening because they're interested in AI and they're kind of playing in that space.

7:30And in addition to that, T-Mobile Ventures to me makes perfect sense, right? Because if these things are out in really remote locations, T-Mobile can probably make a lot of money, number one, doing the connectivity and networking for that. But also, I'm assuming getting T-Mobile Ventures as a partner on this, you could probably throw one of these kind of cameras on the top of a cell tower and that would be a really good vantage point where that could save a ton of money that they normally would have to spend to be able to look out. So the T-Mobile ventures from multiple angles I see as a really useful, of course, Valor Equity Partners makes sense.

8:07Salesforce, I'm interested in their angle. I'm really interested in their angle. But Abe Yoquel, who's a co-founder and managing partner at Congruent Ventures, he praised Pano's AI commitment to innovation and the fight against the escalating devastation caused by wildfires. We're seeing this in California. We're seeing this in Canada, especially I'm up in Canada this year and we see it all over the place. So I think that the alliance with T-Mobile has provided to be beneficial for Piano or Pano AI, which essentially uses the company's 5G network and some of its masts for hardware mounting, as I was predicting earlier.

8:41And Pano's AI business model involves owning the cameras and infrastructure while selling software licenses to clients. So these clients include power utilities, private landowners, and government fire agencies, among others and notable clients are Pacific Corp, Excel Energy, Portland General Electric and several Australian entities. So this is actually really interesting by actually doing the license strategy. People that are really interested in having their infrastructure protected, like, you know, let's say there's a logging company that's far out in the bush or a mining company that's far out in the bush or even the, you know, cell towers or other infrastructure that's kind of far out or a little bit more remote um having these systems in place makes a lot of sense so people definitely are going to want to pay for it because they understand that this is protecting their valuable assets um and then caster also was explaining their pricing model so he said we customize the offering per customer but the typical pricing is fifty thousand dollars per station per year so a customer um you know a customer subscribing to 20 stations would pay an annual sum of approximately a million dollars and then that's an annual fee that they pay.

9:48So with an employee count of around 45 and monitoring over 6 million acres of land, okay, well first off it's kind of funny when people say like, we're monitoring 6 million acres of land. I just think that's a, I don't know, it's kind of a random, it's like a vanity metric, right? It's like a company being like, we have 6 million followers on TikTok. It's like, yeah, that doesn't say how much like sales or customers you actually have. 6 million acres of land, like you could put a camera up pretty high and monitor 600 acres of land but you know whatever um that's uh that's just funny but it's not a big deal anyways pano ai is growing pretty quick they said quote we have about 100 units deployed and we expect to have hundreds more by the end of the year we are expanding rapidly in both the u.s and australia with deployments in six states in the u.s two states in australia and we've started preliminary discussions in europe as well overall i'm really excited for this technology it's going to make a big impact obviously forest fires are something that is an issue for a lot of different jurisdictions and a lot of different locations so i think this is going to be a big play and what an awesome use of ai so overall really excited they're able to extend this with an extra 17 million dollars on this round it'll be interested i'll be interested to follow this company in the future