Berlin-based Dryad raises €10.5M to commercialise ‘ultra-early’ wildfire detection tech

Berlin-based Dryad, a provider of solar-powered environmental sensor networks for ‘ultra-early’ wildfire detection and forest monitoring, announced on Tuesday that it has raised €10.5M in a Series A round of funding.

The round follows the company’s first equity seeding stage, which raised €1.8M and included investment and operational support from STIHL Digital, the VC arm of the well-known chainsaw manufacturer STIHL.

Investors in this round

The Series A round was led by German deep tech venture capitalist eCAPITAL. Additional investors include US-based Toba Capital, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, and strategic investor Semtech – a supplier of high-performance analogue and mixed-signal semiconductors, advanced algorithms and the developer of the LoRa, long-range, low-power wireless platform.

Dr Paul-Josef Patt, CEO of eCAPITAL, says, “Wildfires represent a huge global problem that has not been resolved effectively for too long. With Dryad’s highly scalable technology, we believe that from now on wildfires will be detected before they can cause damage. We, together with our co-investors, support the company on its mission to save millions of hectares of forest, significantly reduce the threat for humans and animals and avoid the emission of over a billion tonnes of CO2.”

Capital utilisation

Dryad says it will use the funds to scale its team, accelerate its go-to-market strategy, and deliver on its mission to fight climate change and protect forests around the world.

CEO of Dryad, Carsten Brinkschulte, says, “With high levels of funding secured, and industry expertise to support us, we’ll not only be able to further scale our team and provide critical ultra-early detection but also open the forestry market to the Internet of Things (IoT) applications. We thank all our Series A and Seed investors for their trust in our market-leading technology, helping us deliver on our mission to fight climate change and protect our planet.”

Offering ultra-early wildfire detection

New technology is urgently required to offer real-time wildfire alerts, enabling firefighters to put out a blaze before it gets out of hand and halt additional harm to our planet due to the rising frequency and severity of fire outbreaks. This is where Dryad looks to make a difference.

The company provides ultra-early detection of wildfires as well as health and growth monitoring of forests using solar-powered gas sensors in a large-scale IoT sensor network. Using its IoT network, sensors can detect wildfires and provide valuable insights into the micro-climate and growth of the forest.

Founded in 2020 by Carsten Brinkschulte, Marco Boenig, and Cherian Mathew, Dryad has spent more than two years developing its end-to-end Silvanet ultra-early wildfire detection and forest monitoring system, which incorporates low-cost sensors, solar-powered LoRa-based mesh networking infrastructure and a cloud analytics platform – which it claims is a market first.

The company aims to tackle wildfires, which cause up to 20 per cent of global CO2 emissions, costing the global economy nearly $140B to date, while having a devastating impact on biodiversity.