EmberEye secures £1.5M in funding

Cambridge startup EmberEye has raised £1.5 million to expand its wildfire detection system in the UK and US. The pitch is simple and brutal: catch a fire at ignition, not after smoke has already had time to travel and flames have had time to grow.

In a field trial with the Marin County Fire Department in California, EmberEye says its system detected a fire in under 60 seconds from more than 100 metres away. The existing camera-based system used in the same test did not spot it. That is the sort of result that gets attention fast, because wildfire detection is usually a race against a head start the fire has already won.

The company, founded by electronics engineer Enrico Miraglia Del Giudice and Stanford PhD student Kyle Nisbet, builds ground-level infrared sensors paired with an AI platform that scores wildfire risk and flags high-risk areas. EmberEye says the system can identify fires within the first minute of ignition, and claims a 100% detection rate across 20 field demonstrations in the UK and US. Those demonstrations included work with the National Trust, Surrey Wildlife Trust, Surrey Fire and Rescue Service, the City of London Corporation and the Ministry of Defence.

The timing matters. EmberEye is targeting a problem that is getting worse as wildfires become more frequent and intense in North America, Australia and Europe. The company points to modelling around the Pacific Palisades wildfire in California: if that fire had been detected within two minutes of ignition, it would have stayed under half a hectare, EmberEye says. Instead, it says detection came around 20 minutes later, by which point the fire had grown to about six hectares. That is the whole argument for this kind of tool: seconds are cheaper than acres.

Dominic Vergine, EmberEye’s president, said the California trial showed the company could detect a fire that the existing system missed. He said the startup is now looking for more trials with public sector groups, conservation organisations and infrastructure operators ahead of the next wildfire season. If those numbers hold up outside a trial, the company has something a lot of fire systems lack: a very short clock.