Frontline Wildfire Defense combats wildfire with new defense solution

Frontline Wildfire Defense, a wildfire defense company that creates products to protect homes and businesses, recently announced the launch of Frontline Defense System 2. This second generation of their fire defense system detects and tracks wildfires using satellite connectivity and tracking software to activate exterior on-site sprinkler hardware and notify customers with wildfire alerts.

Harry Statter, Frontline's founder and CEO, says, "The Frontline Wildfire Defense System 2.0... It's built on our previous version for the Frontline product, and, essentially with wildfire, the threat isn't necessarily fires that start in your backyard. The threat is from fires that are many miles outside of your property, because embers cause 90% of structure emissions and burning embers can be lofted up to 24 miles outside of a wildfire perimeter and those burning embers will land on the combustible surfaces of the home or the business…"

Frontline's automatic system activates external sprinklers when a blaze is within seven miles of the property, saturating an entire structure and nearby potential combustibles that are within 30 feet. The sprinklers precisely release water and foam, the same non-toxic and biodegradable foam used by firefighters, to create an environment that is too wet to burn. 

The company works with a number of different insurers and recently secured $6.4 million in seed funding, spearheaded by Echelon, enabling them to expand their operations on the West Coast and drive future advancements in their product offerings.

"It doesn't really matter at the end of the day how much insurers index the wildfire risk, ultimately, the insurer portfolio is going to be exposed to wildfire and there's going to be a need to physically protect the policy and firefighters simply cannot scale to protect and be at every home or every business…" states Statter. "Time is critical during a wildfire and in order to protect portfolios, insurers need to act quickly and collaboratively with their policyholders... We're able to de-risk their portfolio in both the software and the hardware application."

To protect against the threat of windborne embers, the Frontline product detects wildfires through its software platform, alerts customers with early warnings of approaching fires and triggers the automatic system activation of a property at notice of a wildfire threat. Notifications are sent through the Frontline Wildfire app, offering real-time wildfire maps that customize alerts based on the user's location. The app also includes resources such as essential preparedness checklists, evacuation plans, fire danger indexes and emergency contact groups.

"When you draw a 24 mile radius outside of a wildfire perimeter, it encompasses hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses – way too many for firefighters to be able to scale and protect," explains Statter. "As much as firefighters want to be at these properties to protect them, it's impossible. There's simply not enough firefighters. So we've come up with a solution for providing protection to all of these homes and businesses."