Here on IoT Evolution World — Industrial IoT News, Smart City Sentinel and GenAI Today, as well — we frequently highlight businesses’ financial announcements; significant funding rounds, investors’ upcoming plans, and so on.
For any unfamiliar, here’s the quick, long-story-short version as to why they’re important and worthy of all our readers’ time:
Funding updates often highlight cutting-edge tech entering the field of play. By following these stories, readers can stay apprised of a.) promising early-stage investments and the overall health of the startup ecosystem, b.) motivations and strategies of select venture capital firms, c.) industry challenges being overcome, d.) critical consumer needs being adequately addressed, and e.) developments that pretty regularly lead to real-world successes. By following along, we believe our readers stand to gain valuable info about emerging technologies and growing trends amongst investors.
That brings us to breaking investment-centric news relevant to IoT. It hit our inboxes just earlier this morning:
Dryad Networks has officially announced a major financial boost — €6.3 million, to be specific; upwards of $6.9 million — to further advance its ultra-early wildfire detection and prevention-focused solutions.
The way we see it, what the company has on offer is legitimately compelling. Dryad is continuing to build its large-scale IoT network of sensors that can detect wildfire signs and provide valuable forest analytics to laboratory experts and first responders, alike.
As described by Carsten Brinkschulte, the company’s co-founder and CEO, “What we have are ‘electronic noses’ in our gas sensors and other devices that provide a ‘fingerprint,’ if you will, of a given gas’s composition. We then expose this to our machine learning algorithm, which is trained on crucial data to distinguish between the different types of smells in our lab.”
I had the opportunity to interview Brinkschulte over the summer, and this still proves to be a super interesting topic today. See, Dryad is able to assemble its “Internet of Trees” technologies that can actually “smell” fires. They bring in organic forest material – redwood, pine, eucalyptus and other responsibly harvested samples – and burn them in a highly controlled setting. (Think of a tube with two glass boxes on either side; in one box is the material being burned to generate fumes, and this then travels through the tube to the other box where Dryad’s sensors are able to track the gas composition and essentially read the data.) Read our entire discussion with Brinkschulte here.
“We do this because we want to be an impact-for-profit driver of true environmental impact,” Brinkschulte explained. “We have 50+ global installations for our Internet of Trees, but there’s always more work to be done. The world is heating up as ‘mega-fires’ rage, and we are on a mission to make a real difference.”
So when you puzzle all these pieces together, the significance of a single funding round becomes even more clear.
According to the Dryad Networks official press release, this funding will also “accelerate the development of a new autonomous drone-based system designed to suppress wildfires” at their very inception, codenamed “Florian.” (Editor’s note: I really like this codename, as the word “florian” denotes “blossoming” or “blooming,” which is what we’d hope forests are able to bounce back with following devastating disasters like wildfires.) On top of that, the new capital injection also positions Dryad to scale its Silvanet platform, which we've also discussed directly with Brinkschulte. (Read here.)
And speaking of, Brinkschulte of course commented on the company’s funding.
“We are so thrilled to receive this substantial funding from Landes Brandenburg (ILB), which will significantly advance our ‘Florian’ project. Combining this with the new investment from First Imagine Ventures, we are well-positioned to revolutionize wildfire management,” he added. “Our vision is not only to detect wildfires at their earliest stages but also to suppress them quickly, minimizing damage to communities, ecosystems and infrastructure.”
In the meantime, we’ll continue to keep Dryad Networks on our radars. (As well as other enterprises’ respective funding announcements, especially as they pertain to backing technologies with use cases that truly better our ever-hectic world.)
Click here for additional Dryad Networks coverage of ours.
Learn more about real-world Internet of Things innovation at IoT Evolution Expo 2025, which will be taking place from February 11-13, 2025, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Part of the #TECHSUPERSHOW experience, this event combines educational conference programming with a jam-packed exhibit hall, networking events and other activities, bringing together buyers and providers of business technology products and services that are huge for IoT.
Edited by
Greg Tavarez
