The niche firetech industry has grown fast in the past five years since orange smoke-filled skies shocked the tech capital of San Francisco. Customers for its drones, artificial intelligence and smart grid software include utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric, which wants to avoid sparking any more bankruptcy-inducing fires, and the state of Texas, which is considering building out a fleet of firefighting aircraft after record-setting fires this year.
The entrepreneurs have also drawn interest from both Democrats, who want to fight climate change, and Republicans, who want to boost private-sector alternatives to government and protect rural communities from devastation.
Over the past year, a group of mostly California-based CEOs has met several times with members of Congress, including Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), who will be key to forestry funding in upcoming Farm Bill negotiations as the lead Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, and staff for Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La), who’s on the verge of securing his speakership over the next Congress.
Weiner filed paperwork on Tuesday to form a trade association for fire technology companies to lobby state and federal governments for more funding and better procurement policies. He unveiled the Association for FireTech Innovation at the annual Red Sky Summit in San Francisco, which gathered start-up founders, firefighters, utility executives and government officials.
Not everyone at the summit was quick to see opportunity in Trump’s rise. A half-dozen entrepreneurs declined to speak on the record, citing their personal political allegiances to liberal causes. Others cited concerns that Trump’s threats to withhold federal aid for California’s wildfires, claw back Biden’s climate spending and dismantle government bureaucracy could bring chaos to potential customers like the U.S. Forest Service.
But at least one acknowledged he’s switching up his message to appeal to Republicans. James Brooks, CEO of Fire Aside, which sells software to digitize wildfire-preparedness home inspections, said the D.C. trips changed his approach.
“The perception that we took away from a bunch of those meetings was that tax cuts will be a very important part of their agenda, so however we can position resilience-related work to be packaged into tax credits would be of interest,” he said. Anticipating a possible trifecta of Republican power, he’s already started building more mentions of possible tax credits for home-hardening into his software.
His efficiency sales pitch is also getting traction in both red and blue districts: Berkeley’s fire chief endorsed Fire Aside by saying it cut time spent on follow-up questions after home inspections by 90 percent.
The message is likely to resonate with Trump, who on Tuesday named tech CEO Elon Musk to lead a new government efficiency review panel. Musk also has some direct firetech connections: One of the founding members of the new trade group is Muon Tech, which is working with Musk’s SpaceX to launch a constellation of climate-monitoring satellites.
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