“Pano AI is a development stage firm primarily based in San Francisco, and we’re a workforce that is made up of each technologists in addition to former firefighting professionals. We got here collectively as a result of we noticed a possibility to leverage modern-day expertise to arm firefighters with higher instruments to fight the rising wildfire risk.
Being a San Francisco-based firm, we have all skilled the devastation of wildfires firsthand. We have lived underneath clouds of smoke for weeks at a time. We have had mates and family members who’ve misplaced their houses and have been evacuated from faculties and hospitals. Tens of hundreds of individuals die annually from wildfire smoke. Wildfire smoke emits $1.7 billion tons of CO2 emissions annually. This downside is rising partly attributable to local weather change.
The excellent news is that there are methods that we are able to roll again this wildfire pattern even earlier than humanity has solved local weather change.
That is what we got down to do with Pano. With our first product, we’re targeted on the early part of a hearth: the time between ignition and, say, the primary hour of a hearth, when a hearth is 5-10 acres. That is a essential inflection level of the fireplace.
The standard strategy is just too sluggish in as we speak’s situations. The standard strategy includes detection by a bystander who occurs to see the fireplace and calls 911 after which the bystander’s name must be confirmed by a single fireplace engine who drives round and tries to find out the situation & severity of the fireplace. Most of those calls are false alarms and loads of time and vitality is wasted on this effort. Then the only fireplace engine calls again to dispatch to ask for assist, often from an area metropolis response, which was once enough however is now not enough in as we speak’s situations.
Earlier than Pano was based, there was a want from the firefighting neighborhood for modern-day distant sensing expertise to hurry up and streamline each step on this course of.
The middle of our resolution is a proprietary community of mountaintop cameras. We’ve got a system known as Pano Station that features two ultra-high-definition safety cameras. Pano stations have a 10-mile vary so you do not want too a lot of them.
