A Boulder Creek tech startup is using drones and AI to detect the next big wildfire

What began as weekly meetings between Boulder Creek residents and local firefighters outside the Brookdale Lodge in the months following the CZU Lightning Complex Fire has evolved five years after the blaze into a pioneering wildfire detection system that could transform how communities respond to fire threats. 

Their creation: a network of artificial intelligence-powered sensors that scan for smoke every minute and alert both residents and emergency services to the early signs of a blaze, paired with autonomous drones that can deliver fire suppressant to remote locations.

The startup behind this technology, Ember Flash Aerospace, emerged from conversations between Lee Kohlman, a NASA Ames Research Center employee who was living in Boulder Creek when the CZU fire hit, and Joseph Norris, a former Coast Guard member with experience in software and driverless cars, who traveled to Silicon Valley frequently for work. Along with local firefighters and tech-savvy neighbors, Kohlman and Norris identified a critical gap in wildfire response: the need for faster detection in those crucial first minutes when a small fire can still be contained.

Ember Flash joins an increasingly crowded field of new technology that is reshaping the fight against wildfires. Researchers, governments and the private sector are racing to detect blazes earlier and stop them before they spread using tools like sensors, satellites and artificial intelligence to identify the lightning strikes most likely to ignite fires, or detect the earliest whispers of smoke. Private companies are also experimenting with autonomous helicopters, smart sprinkler systems and mobile water delivery to help battle blazes as hotter, drier conditions fuel larger fires.

The growing frequency and intensity of wildfires prompted XPrize — a nonprofit-run competition program that offers millions of dollars in prize money to entrepreneurs to solve big problems through technology — to launch a new challenge focused on wildfires in 2023. 

“XPrize is a California-based organization and so many of our staff, sponsors, board members have experienced destructive wildfires so this was both a personal challenge for many as well as a global challenge,” said Andrea Santy, program director for the new XPrize Wildfire contest.  

Ember Flash was named a semifinalist in the XPrize Wildfire competition. The winners stand to make as much as $3.5 million when they’re announced in 2026. Finals testing is scheduled for July of next year. 

From the ashes of CZU

For Norris, Kohlman and their colleagues, pairing Silicon Valley technology with wildfire fighting seemed like a no-brainer.

Kohlman and his wife had been living in Boulder Creek for about a year when the fire broke out. The couple had moved from Virginia to take jobs at the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University and NASA’s Ames Research Center. When lightning storms happened on Aug. 16, 2020, Kohlman didn’t think much of it at first; as a Midwest native, he and his wife were used to it, even if it was a little abnormal for California. It wasn’t until the next day that they heard about a potential fire, but he wasn’t too worried. Then his wife received a notification on her phone and called him from work, and he stepped outside to look. 

“I saw an orange glow to the northwest, just a couple of ridges over,” he recalled. “We had to quickly figure out what to do next.” 

He gathered the couple’s two dogs and two cats and packed a few bags. He and his wife decamped for a short-term rental on Foster City, where they’d end up staying for six weeks. For an agonizingly long time, they weren’t sure if they’d have a home to return to. Their house survived the blaze, but they came back to a forever-changed community. 

In those weeks and months after the fire, Kohlman spent a lot of time taking photographs of burnt buildings and trees to get a clearer picture of the fire’s extensive damage. He spoke with neighbors about their experiences with the CZU Lightning Complex, including those who’d lost their homes. He felt helpless and wanted to change that. So about six months after the fire, he put a call out on a Facebook page for Boulder Creek neighbors, looking for other people to discuss their experience and what had happened — everything from how they found out about the fire, to how they felt going through this experience, and what the rebuilding process would entail. 

A group of residents, including several local firefighters, met up and then kept meeting weekly, with topics ranging from community recovery to how wildfires are fought. Kohlman invited his friend and former neighbor, Joseph Norris, to attend. 

“We started having some little meetings,” said Norris. “Our first meeting was at the Brookdale Lodge at the picnic tables outside. We weren’t thinking about much more than what could be done, ‘How can we help others do more?’”

For Norris, who started his career in the Coast Guard, emergency response had long been an interest. He’d been a volunteer firefighter in his younger years before getting into software, working for companies focused on everything from software for nonprofit organizations to artificial intelligence and driverless cars. He and Kohlman befriended each other when they were both living in Virginia, and the pair had long talked about possible business ideas.

“There were a lot of people in Boulder Creek who had a lot of skills and wanted to do something [in the wake of the fire],” said Norris. “We felt like we were way too close to Silicon Valley to not be using a little technology for this.”

As the group discussed barriers to response, such as being located in rural areas where homes are farther apart, and current firefighting approaches, a key challenge emerged: the need to speed up wildfire detection. 

“Those first few minutes are really important, when [a fire is] small, just ignited,” said Norris. “If you can get to those quickly and put them out, you can stop a wildfire.”

‘New era in megafires’

Fighting fires in rural, often rugged terrain is complicated and becoming harder. Fires like the CZU Lightning Complex are fast-moving and can leap from one place to another, faster than a car can drive, wildfire experts say. 

California has been in a “new era of megafires” for about a decade, driven by factors including climate change, buildup of dry brush and dead leaves, and the fact that more people now live in wildfire-prone areas, said Chris Field, a professor at Stanford University whose research focuses on climate change and the impacts of wildfires.

Even for experienced firefighters, these blazes are incredibly challenging. 

“California has some of the most sophisticated and well-trained firefighters,” Field said. “It’s not that we don’t have the people [with skills] – it’s that these fires are getting more intense and harder to fight, which is where new technologies can come in.” 

Earlier notifications could also help residents make better preparations in the event of a fire, such as asking a neighbor to pick up your pets for you rather than driving back to Boulder Creek from your job in Santa Cruz, said Norris. 

Statewide, California’s evacuation alert systems came under scrutiny following fires throughout the summer of 2020. As the Associated Press reported, notifications were sometimes spotty or slow, and some residents said they never received them. Santa Cruz County leaders launched a new and improved alert and warning system, CruzAware, in 2023, driven in part by the lessons learned from the CZU Lightning Complex Fire. 

Even with upgraded warning systems, gaps remain; systems vary by region, phone alerts can be ignored as robocalls, and sometimes alerts still come too late for residents to return home to gather their belongings before evacuating. 

To help solve these problems, Ember Flash developed Vigilant Detect, which essentially involves special sensors that combine advanced cameras and AI. The cameras can capture images every minute and the system then uses AI to analyze those images in real time for early signs of wildfire smoke. The idea is that these monitors could be installed in neighborhoods and Firewise communities, groups of neighbors who’ve come together to reduce wildfire risks in the community. Property owners and emergency service agencies could then receive notifications through an app when the system detects a wildfire. 

The company is currently doing pilot programs in a few sites in Santa Cruz County and other fire-prone areas, including residential neighborhoods, municipalities and local vineyards, Norris said. The Ember Flash team works on site to identify the best locations for the sensors and ensure everything runs smoothly. These tests help the company refine its detection algorithms, test the durability of the hardware and the product design in real-world conditions while also collecting feedback about the user experience. Ember Flash is looking for more property owners interested in joining its pilot program.

Norris said the company expects to be able to start selling their products to neighborhood associations and fire protection districts next year.

Vigilant Detect isn’t the only project the company’s working on. It’s also working with Dutch company Kitepower to mount Ember Flash’s AI-powered smoke-sensing devices on Kitepower’s high-tech kites that generate energy from wind. The idea there is that these kites could be flown into remote, windy places to detect wildfires while they’re still just wisps of smoke. 

Another effort is using drone technology for both gathering real-time data about existing fires and rapidly helping to put them out. The company’s Vigilant Raptor is an autonomous drone that can quickly navigate into hard-to-reach areas to dispense fire suppressant. These could be owned and used by private citizens, but Norris said the company envisions fire protection districts (the local government entities responsible for fire prevention and suppression in a specific geographic area) as the primary customers for these devices. 

“Our goal is to make them inexpensive, make them smart and make them fast,” Norris said of the company’s products. 

Eyes on the XPrize

The company’s Vigilant Raptor is currently a semifinalist in the XPrize Wildfire competition, in which teams around the world are competing in two different tracks to transform how wildfires are detected, managed and fought. 

The competition is divided into two tracks, space-based detection and intelligence and autonomous wildfire response, according to Santy. From more than 150 submissions, 49 teams were selected to advance and in 2025, semifinals testing began. 

Ember Flash was one of 15 semifinalists in the intelligence and autonomous wildfire response category and it now moves on to finals testing, which is slated for July 2026. The company will have to demonstrate to the contest’s judges that within 10 minutes, it can autonomously detect and suppress a high-risk fire in a 621-square-mile, environmentally challenging area. 

“The competition kind of kicked us into a slightly different route,” Norris said. “It kicked our suppression efforts into high gear.”

While the Kohlmans have since moved back to their native Ohio, Ember Flash Aerospace remains firmly rooted in Boulder Creek. Its local team members include Zach Ackemann, a former Felton firefighter who now runs the company’s business operations, and Steve Lindsey-Guerrero, a deputy fire chief in Palo Alto who serves as a technical expert.  In addition to the San Lorenzo Valley, the company also has an engineering team in Oklahoma. 

So far, Ember Flash has been funded by investments from its founding team and early employees, but company leaders said they’re also looking for investors and funding to help them scale.

For Kohlman and Norris, Ember Flash is now their full-time job, and both spend a lot of time in Santa Cruz County as testing, prototyping and development continue, with pilot programs underway. Involving community members to test out their products is a key part of the company’s efforts and harkens back to the conversations that inspired Ember Flash in the first place – giving residents a way to help out with efforts to improve wildfire notification and response. 

“We really want to empower them to be part of the solution,” Kohlman said of community members and non-firefighters. “People want to help. If a lot of people do a lot of small things, it can make a big difference.”

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