Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, is an unlikely person to disrupt an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company manufactures fire extinguishing nozzles. Specifically, a nozzle that can extinguish fires up to three times faster than previous products while saving 67% water. But Sethi speaks matter-of-factly about his accomplishments, focusing more on what he’ll do next than what he’s accomplished so far. And what happens next seems like something much bigger than a fire nozzle.
His path to becoming a firefighter doesn’t follow a neat story. After earning his PhD researching surfaces and adhesion at the University of Akron, he founded ADAP Nanotech, an organization that developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and won an Air Force Research Laboratory grant. Next, at SunPower, we developed new materials and processes for rooftop photovoltaic modules. Next, when I joined a company called TE Connectivity, I worked on developing devices with new adhesive formulations that enabled faster manufacturing in the automotive industry.
Then a challenge came from my wife. The two had moved from Ohio to the East Bay suburb of San Francisco in 2013. A few years later, the Thomas Fire occurred. They thought this was the only huge fire they had ever seen. Then came the Camp Fire, and then the Napa-Sonoma Fires. The breaking point came in 2019. Sethi was traveling during an evacuation order, his wife was home alone with their 3-year-old daughter at the time, and they had no family nearby and faced the possibility of an evacuation order. “She was really mad at me,” Sethi recalls. “She said, ‘Hey, you’re not a real scientist unless you fix this.'”
His background, which spans nanotechnology, solar power, semiconductors and automotive, makes his thinking “open-minded and flexible,” he says. He’s seen so many industries, so many different issues. Want to solve the problem?
In June 2020, HEN Technologies (high efficiency nozzle manufacturing) was established near Hayward. With funding from the National Science Foundation, he conducted research in computational fluid dynamics to analyze how water suppresses fires and how wind affects fires. The result is a nozzle that precisely controls droplet size, manages velocity in new ways, and resists wind.
In the HEN comparison video that Sethi showed us on a Zoom call, the difference is clear. He says the flow rate is the same, but HEN’s pattern and speed control keeps the flow consistent while a traditional nozzle disperses it.
But the nozzle is just the beginning. These are what Sethi calls “ground muscles.” HEN has since expanded into monitors, valves, overhead sprinklers, pressure equipment, and this year will launch flow control equipment (“Stream IQ”) and emission control systems. Each device contains a custom-designed circuit board with sensors and computing power, and there are 23 different designs, some powered by Nvidia Orion Nano processors, that turn dumb hardware into smart, connected equipment, Sethi said. According to Sethi, HEN has applied for a total of 20 patents so far, six of which have been granted.
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The real innovation is the systems these devices create. HEN’s platform allows the pump’s sensor to act as a virtual sensor in the nozzle, precisely tracking when the pump is turned on, how much water flows, and the pressure required. The system records exactly how much water was used on a particular fire, how the water was used, which hydrants were used for faucets, and what the weather conditions were.
Why it’s important: There is a lack of communication between water suppliers and firefighters, otherwise the fire department could run out of water. It happened with the Palisades fire. That happened with the Oakland fires decades ago. If two engines are connected to one fire hydrant, pressure fluctuations can cause one engine to suddenly go empty if the fire continues to grow. In rural America, water tenders, the tankers that transport water from distant sources, face a logistical nightmare. If you can integrate water usage calculations with your own utility monitoring system to optimize resource allocation, that’s a big win.
So HEN built a cloud platform with an application layer. Sethi likens this to what Adobe has done with its cloud infrastructure. Consider a separate a la carte system for fire chiefs, battalion commanders, and incident commanders. HEN’s system includes weather data. All devices are equipped with GPS. It can alert those on the front lines that the wind is changing and they should start their engines, or that a particular fire truck is low on water.
The Department of Homeland Security has been seeking just this type of system through its NERIS program, an effort to bring predictive analytics to emergency operations. “But you can’t get it [predictive analytics] “If you don’t have the right hardware, you can’t get high-quality data,” Sethi says.
Sethi says that while building a predictive analytics platform for emergency response can be daunting, actually selling it is even more challenging, and he’s most proud of HEN’s traction on that front.
“The most difficult thing about starting this company is that this market is tough, because when you think about convincing customers to buy, it’s a B2C strategy, but the procurement cycle is B2B,” he explains. “So you really have to create a product that resonates with people, the end user, but you still have to go through the government purchasing cycle, and we passed both of those.”
The numbers bear this out. HEN brought its first product to market in the second quarter of 2023, with 10 fire departments working together to generate $200,000 in revenue. Then rumors began to spread. Revenue is expected to reach $1.6 million in 2024 and $5.2 million last year. Hen, which currently has 1,500 fire department customers, projects $20 million in revenue this year.
Of course, HEN has competition. IDEX Corp is a publicly traded company that sells hoses, nozzles, and monitors. Software companies like Central Square provide services to fire departments. First Due, a Miami company that sells software to public safety agencies, announced a massive $355 million in funding last August. But Sethi argues that no company is “doing exactly what we set out to do.”
In any case, Sethi says the constraint is not demand, but scaling fast enough. HEN serves the Marine Corps, U.S. Army bases, Naval Atomic Research Institute, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Defense, and ships in 22 countries. It is sold through 120 distributors and recently achieved GSA status after a year-long review process (a federal stamp of approval that makes it easier for military and government agencies to purchase).
Fire departments purchase approximately 20,000 new engines each year to replace aging equipment in the nation’s 200,000 vehicles. So once HEN is certified, it becomes recurring revenue (the idea) and the revenue continues during the purchase cycle as the hardware generates the data.
HEN’s two goals required building a very specific team. The company’s head of software was previously a senior director who helped build Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. Other members of HEN’s 50-person team include former NASA engineers and veterans of Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. “When I get asked technical questions, I can’t answer them all,” Sethi admits with a laugh. [it] It was a blessing. ”
In fact, it’s the software that makes this interesting. Because while HEN sells nozzles, it accumulates something more valuable: data. Very specific, real-world data about how water behaves under pressure, how flow rates interact with materials, how fires respond to suppression techniques, and how physics works in an active fire environment.
That’s exactly what companies building so-called world models need. These AI systems that build simulated representations of the physical environment and predict future states require real-world multimodal data from physical systems under extreme conditions. Simulation alone cannot teach physics to AI. You will need what HEN collects for each deployment.
Sethi won’t elaborate, but he knows what he’s sitting on. Companies training robotics and predictive physics engines will pay a lot of money for this kind of real-world physics data.
Investors are seeing it too. Last month, HEN closed a $20 million Series A round and raised an additional $2 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank. O’Neill Strategic Capital led the funding, with participation from NSFO, Tanas Capital and z21 Ventures. This round brings the company’s total funding to more than $30 million.
Meanwhile, Sethi is already looking ahead. He said the company would resume fundraising in the second quarter of this year.
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