This founder cracked firefighting — now he’s creating an AI gold mine

Summary

Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t sound like someone who’s disrupted an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company builds fire nozzles — specifically, nozzles that it says increase suppression rates by up to 300% while conserving 67% of water. But Sethi is matter-of-fact about this achievement, more focused on what’s next than what’s already been done. And what’s next sounds a lot bigger than fire nozzles. His path to firefighting doesn’t follow a tidy narrative. After nabbing his PhD at the University of Akron, where he researched surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech, an outfit that developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and won Air Force Research Lab grants. Next, at SunPower, he developed new materials and processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. When he landed next at a company called TE Connectivity, he worked on devices with new adhesive formulations to enable faster manufacturing in the automotive industry. Then came a challenge from his wife. The two had moved from Ohio to the East Bay outside San Francisco in 2013. A few years later came the Thomas Fire — the only megafire they’d ever see, they thought. Then came the Camp Fire, then the Napa-Sonoma fires. The breaking point came in 2019. Sethi was traveling during evacuation warnings while his wife was home alone with their then three-year-old daughter, no family nearby, facing a potential evacuation order. “She was really mad at me,” Sethi recalls. “She’s like, ‘Dude, you need to fix this, otherwise you’re not a real scientist.’” A background spanning nanotechnology, solar, semiconductors, and automotive had made his thinking “bias free and flexible,” as he puts it. He’d seen so many industries, so many different problems. Why not try to fix the problem? In June 2020, he founded HEN Technologies (for high-efficiency nozzles) in nearby Hayward. With National Science Foundation funding, he conducted computational fluid dynamics research, anal...