Saving our Planet One Fire at a Time

Fire season shaped Vasily Tremsin’s life, barring the California native from playing high school sports or going outdoors as much as he’d like, due to poor air quality. Frustrated by the lack of intervention, he developed a novel multivariable early-warning system, which earned him top honors at the California Science & Engineering Fair in 2018. From there, he was introduced to Michael Buckwald, a serial entrepreneur who’s not easy to impress.

Buckwald previously co-founded Leap Motion, a touchless user interface that can interact with a computer with finger gestures or the wave of a hand. He was looking for his next venture when he met Tremsin. Given that wildfires are increasing by 30% every year and show no signs of abating, Buckwald instantly saw the potential in Tremsin’s engineering,

Torch’s novel IoT system warns users of fires while they are still containable, leveraging a mesh network across large swathes of variable terrain

“When you move to Silicon Valley, you believe technology can and should be able to solve anything,” says Buckwald. “When smoke blankets our neighborhoods and we’re living in darkness at noon for weeks every year, it just doesn't make sense to me that we haven’t found a tech-enabled solution. There were some tools for wildfire prevention, but no one was approaching it from a truly disruptive perspective.”

Building upon Tremsin’s work, Buckwald, Tremsin and his father Anton Tremsin (CTO) founded Torch Systems. The company’s accessible outdoor smoke detector provides early fire detection at an affordable cost. The company's novel Internet of Things (IoT) system can recognize a fire when it’s under two square foot in size — much smaller than what satellites (the current prevention standard) can detect. Torch’s system warns users of fires while they are still containable, leveraging a mesh network across large swathes of variable terrain.

California has more than 33 million acres of forest land, and well over half of that is owned by the federal government, while 3% is owned by the state. This land is largely unsupervised, making it particularly susceptible to catching fire. Since it doesn’t rely on Wi-Fi to communicate alerts, Torch’s system can operate in rural areas, offering much-needed oversight to California forests.

The Torch team has finalized their prototype and will be installing devices throughout Malibu and the Napa vineyards in California in the near future.