This inventor messed with the fireworks — now he’s building an AI gold mine

Sunny Sethi, founder of Concept of the company HEN Technologiesit doesn’t sound like someone who has disrupted an industry that hasn’t changed since the 1960s. His company makes fire nozzles – specifically, nozzles that are said to increase compression rates by up to 300% and save 67% of water. But Sethi is famous for this, he focuses more on the future than on the past. And the next one sounds bigger than the lips of fire.

His method of firefighting does not follow a linear narrative. After getting his PhD at the University of Akron, where he researched surfaces and adhesives, he founded ADAP Nanotech, an outfit that made carbon nanotube history and won Air Force Research Lab funding. Then, at SunPower, he developed new materials and processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. When he arrived at a company called TE Connectivity, he worked on new adhesives for rapid production in the automotive market.

Then his wife objected. The couple had moved from Ohio to the East Bay outside of San Francisco in 2013. A few years later came the Thomas Fire – the only fire they’d ever seen, they thought. Then came the Camp Fire, then the Napa-Sonoma fire. The crisis came in 2019. Sethi was traveling during an evacuation alert while his wife was home alone with their three-year-old daughter, with no family nearby, facing an evacuation order. “He was very angry with me,” recalls Sethi. He’s like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to fix this, or you’re not a real scientist.’

A background in nanotechnology, solar, semiconductors, and automobiles made his ideas “unbiased and flexible,” as he puts it. He had seen so many industries, so many different problems. Why? no trying to fix the problem?

In June 2020, he launched HEN Technologies (for high performance nozzles) in nearby Hayward. With funding from the National Science Foundation, he conducted hydroelectric research, analyzing how water suppresses fires and how it affects wind. The result: a nozzle that controls droplet size with precision, controls speed in new ways, and resists wind.

In the HEN comparison video, which Sethi shows me on a Zoom phone, the difference is stark. It’s the same speed, he says, but the HEN’s shape and speed control keep the stream consistent where traditional nozzles scatter.

But the nose is just the beginning – what Sethi calls “the muscles underneath.” HEN has been expanding into lighting, valves, surface sprinklers, and pressure equipment, and is introducing a flow control device (“Stream IQ”) and flow control systems this year. According to Sethi, each device consists of a custom-made circuit board with sensors and computing power — 23 different designs that turn dumb devices into smart, connected devices, some powered by Nvidia Orion Nano processors. In all, says Sethi, HEN has submitted 20 approved applications and half a dozen have been submitted so far.

The real innovation is the system that these devices create. The HEN platform uses sensors on the faucet to act as a real sensor in the nozzle, tracking exactly when it is, how much water is flowing, and how fast it is needed. The system records exactly how much water was used for a given fire, how it was used, which drain was plugged, and what the weather was like.

Why it matters: Fire departments can run out of water one way or another, because there is no connection between water suppliers and firefighters. It happened in the Palisades Fire. This happened in the Oakland Fire decades earlier. When two engines are connected to the same hydrant, power fluctuations can mean that one engine suddenly gets nothing as the fire progresses. In rural America, water tenders, which are tanks that hold water from remote areas, face their nightmares. If they can integrate water usage calculations with their analysis systems to achieve resource allocation, that’s a big win.

So HEN built a cloud platform with application layers, which Sethi compares to what Adobe did with cloud architecture. Consider Individual systems a la carte for fire marshals, military commanders, and event managers. The HEN system contains weather data; it has GPS on all devices. It can warn those ahead that the wind is about to shift and they should move their engines, or that a certain motor vehicle is running out of water.

The Department of Homeland Security has been questioning exactly this type of plan through its own The NERIS programwhich is a way to bring future predictions to emergency services. “But you can’t have (predictive analytics) unless you have good data,” Sethi says. “You can’t have good data unless you have the right tools.”

HEN is not monetizing this data. It’s setting up data systems, putting tools in as many machines as possible, building data pipelines, creating a data lake. Next year, says Sethi, it will start selling a portion of its applications with built-in intelligence.

If building a predictive platform to respond to emergencies sounds daunting, Sethi says the sale is strong, and he’s very proud of HEN’s appeal on this front.

“The most difficult part of building this company is that this market is difficult because it is a B2C game when you think about attracting customers to buy, but the time to buy is B2B,” he explains. “So you have to make something that’s very relevant to the people – and the user – but you still have to go through the public procurement process, and we’ve messed it all up.”

The numbers prove this. HEN launched its first products in the market in the second quarter of 2023, installing 10 fire departments and making a total of $ 200,000. Then voices began to be heard. Revenue hit $1.6 million in 2024, then $5.2 million last year. This year, Hen, which currently has 1,500 firefighting customers, is planning to spend $20 million.

HEN has competition, of course. IDEX Corp, a public company, sells pipes, nozzles, and lighting fixtures. Software companies like Central Square serve fire departments. Miami-based company First Due, which sells software to public security agencies, has made a big announcement $355 million round August is over. But no company is “doing what we’re trying to do,” insists Sethi.

However, Sethi says the barrier isn’t needed – it’s growing big enough. HEN works for the Marine Corps, the US military, the Naval atomic labs, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Defense, and ships to 22 countries. It works through 120 distributors and has recently been qualified by the GSA after a year-long evaluation process (it is a federal seal that makes it easier for military and government agencies to buy).

Fire departments buy about 20,000 new engines every year to replace aging equipment in the country’s 200,000 units, so when HEN is suitable, it is a recurring investment (and a concept), and because the hardware generates data, the costs continue between purchases.

Two goals for HEN to make a real team. Its program director was a senior leader who helped create Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. Other members of the 50-member HEN team include former NASA engineers and veterans from Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. “If you ask me technical questions, I can’t answer anything,” Sethi admits with a laugh, “but I have such good teams that (it) has been a blessing.”

Indeed, it is the program that shows where this gets interesting, because while HEN is selling nozzles, it is collecting something very important: data. Real-time, real-time data about how water reacts under pressure, how flow rates are related to materials, how fire responds to compression methods, how physics works in flammable environments.

It is similar to what the construction industry called the national models. These AI systems that create natural simulations to predict the future need real-time, multi-dimensional data from physical systems under extreme conditions. You cannot teach AI about physics through simulations alone. You need information that HEN collects and sends everywhere.

Seth can’t explain it, but he knows what he’s been up to. Companies that train robotics and predictive physics engines can pay well for real-world data quality.

Marketers see it too. Last monthHEN closed a $20 million Series A round, including $2 million in debt from Silicon Valley Bank. O’Neil Strategic Capital led the investment, with NSFO, Tanas Capital, and z21 Ventures. This round brought the company’s total revenue to over $30 million.

Seth, meanwhile, is already looking ahead. He said the company will return to fundraising in the second quarter of this year.