As California burns, this European spacetech firm could help predict the next wildfire

The world is ever more on fire. At time of writing, the January 2025 California wildfires have seen 180,000 people evacuated from their homes and at least ten killed.

As climate change widens the fire seasons in California and Australia, experts have warned the two regions are unlikely to be able to share fire-fighting resources as they have in the past. In Brazil, around 22.38 million hectares of land were consumed in 2024, leading to massive biodiversity loss and carbon released into the atmosphere.

Inevitably attention has turned to efforts to mitigate, rather than totally suppress, the damage caused by wildfires. Controlling wildfires, however, is a notoriously difficult proposition, given their fast-changing burn patterns.

This is concerning not just because of the destruction to nature and property, but the human toll as well.

"I have a lot of friends who are firefighters back in my home state of Utah and the idea that they're marching into an environment where they don't exactly know what is going on is incredibly scary,” said Zach Ricklefs, spokesperson for Munich-based OroraTech. "Our mission is to help mitigate wildfires as they get worse and try to make an impact on this vicious cycle that we've seen in the last few years."

OroraTech was founded in 2018 by Thomas Grübler, Florian Mauracher, Rupert Amann and Björn Stoffers. Grübler’s experiences as a firefighter in the Austrian Alps taught him just how little information firefighters often have to go on when trying to strategically approach an outbreak. Later, while researching at the Technical University of Munich, he devised a system for wildfire detection by attaching thermal imaging cameras to satellites.

Jump forward to January 2025. After several rounds of VC funding and some assistance from European public bodies such as the European Space Agency and German Aerospace Center, OroraTech is preparing to launch its third satellite, FOREST-3, working with SpaceX. By the end of 2026, the company aims to have around 100 satellites operating which will allow coverage over any part of the earth every 30 minutes.

"Trying to know the unknowable"

The data collected by the thermal imaging cameras are provided to firefighters so they can work most effectively – data such as where the fires are, how big they are and where they are likely to spread.

Users access the data via a real-time web platform and can also set up localised notifications, to get word as soon as a fire is breaking out. The company, who is now led by CEO Martin Langer, also develops prediction models for the likelihood of fires in a certain area at any given moment.

"We're really trying to know the unknowable," said Ricklefs. "So much of what Mother Nature is doing is very hard to predict, but when you have enough data, you can start seeing trends and be able to prepare for it."

The company has over 90 clients, including governments, forestry agencies, insurers and companies with large land holdings. They also provide services to carbon credit verifiers, to ensure the land used is monitored and protected.

After its latest €25m Series B funding round in late 2024, with backing from Ananda Impact Ventures and Bayern Kapital among others, the company is valued at around €110-160m. At the end of 2024 as well, OroraTech landed part of a €53m contract from the Greek government, alongside Finnish microsatellite manufacturer ICEYE, to put four OroraTech thermal camera-equipped satellites in orbit.

Building up a database

Aside from the satellite cameras themselves, the company works with huge amounts of on-the-ground data from a wide variety of sources, building up a database of forest types, flora and fauna populations, average wind and weather conditions, temperature, historical fire patterns, etc. All of those data are crucial to get an accurate picture of what’s actually happening on the ground.

Take the fires in California, said Ricklefs. "There are a lot of things that burn there, but the reason (the fires) moved so quickly is because they were getting wind speeds of up to 70, 80 miles an hour. Without knowing what that wind speed is, it is really hard to predict what a fire is going to do next. And so, adding all these data sources together we get our wildfire solution, which allows us to be very accurate in terms of where the fire is and what it's going to do."