Max Brodie was 12 years old when a lightning strike near his hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia, ignited a wildfire that a thousand firefighters and a fleet of waterbombers couldn’t stop. As hot ash filled the sky, the boy scrambled up a ladder to help his father anchor soaker hoses to the roof to keep it wet. The house survived, but 33,000 residents, including Brodie, were evacuated during that 2003 firestorm. Fifteen years later, he was living in San Francisco and wondering what to do after selling his second software startup when, 180 miles to the north, another monster burst from the forest. That blaze killed 85 people, reduced Paradise, California, to ashes, and awakened his boyhood trauma. “I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, nothing’s changed,’” he says. Now he knew what to do.
The next year, Brodie and two partners formed Rain Industries Inc. to develop the software an autonomous aircraft would need to find a fire and put it out before it spread. Four years of research and development and a couple of funding rounds later, Rain teamed up with the Sikorsky unit of Lockheed Martin Corp., the world’s largest defense contractor, to help turn a Black Hawk helicopter into an autonomous firefighting machine, using artificial intelligence to deliver the quick response that is firefighting’s Holy Grail.