Dryad brings €10.5 million to accelerate forest fire early detection technology

According to Berlin Dryad, wildfires cause up to 20 percent of global CO2 emissions and have cost the global economy nearly $140 billion, not to mention their devastating impact on biodiversity. To combat the problem, low-cost sensors and cloud-based analytics platform are the need of the hour.

Offering real-time wildfire warnings so firefighters can put out fires before they get out of control, solar-powered environmental sensor network platform Dryad has raised €10.5 million in a Series A funding round. The investment will fuel expansion campaigns to fight climate change and protect forests around the world.

Founded in 2020 Carsten Brinkshulte, Marco Boenigand Cherian Mathew, a forest monitoring startup offers early forest fire detection and forest health and growth monitoring using solar-powered gas sensors in a large-scale IoT sensor network. Using an IoT network, sensors can detect forest fires and provide valuable information about microclimate and forest growth.

The Series A round was led by a German deep-tech venture capitalist eCAPITAL and supported by the US The capital of TobaMarc Benioff TIME Venturesand Semtech. Dryad has raised a total of €13.9 million, including a €1.6 million grant from the Investitionsbank des Landes Brandenburg.

Dryad CEO Carsten Brinkshulte said: “We want to further grow our team and provide critical ultra-early detection, as well as open up the forestry market to Internet of Things (IoT) applications.”

Dr. Paul-Joseph Pat, CEO of eCAPITAL, added: “Forest fires represent a huge global problem that has not been effectively addressed for too long. We believe that with Dryad’s highly scalable technology, wildfires will be detected before they can cause damage. Together with our co-investors, we support the company in its mission to save millions of hectares of forest, significantly reduce the threat to humans and animals, and avoid more than a billion tons of CO2 emissions.”