Inevitable: Autonomous Wildfire Suppression with Seneca

Date: January 27, 2026
Host: Cody Simms
Guest: Stu Landesberg, Co-founder & CEO of Seneca

Episode Overview

This episode centers on one of the world’s most urgent climate resilience challenges: wildfires. Host Cody Simms sits down with Stu Landesberg, CEO and co-founder of Seneca, a startup developing large, autonomous aerial firefighting vehicles (“robotic firefighters in the sky”). They discuss how Seneca’s technology addresses the crucial early minutes of wildfire response, the gaps in current fire suppression, how drones function in practice, supply chain and US-based manufacturing, regulatory challenges, business model, customer adoption, and the existential threat wildfires present to both people and the environment. Landesberg shares personal stories, technical details, and a call to action for collective innovation.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Why Wildfires, Why Now?

• Motivation: Landesberg—having previously exited Grove, a sustainability e-commerce platform—felt a personal and professional call to solving wildfire challenges, especially as climate-driven fire risk has soared in recent decades.
  • “It’s touched me personally in little ways… My father in law’s house is only still standing because of the bravery of a bunch of firefighters in Santa Rosa.” (B, 02:54)
• Scale & Urgency:
  • Skyrocketing insurance costs, home loss, and the broader threat to the American West as habitable space.
  • “If you can’t protect homes from fire, you can’t have home insurance. If you can’t have home insurance, you can’t have mortgage financing. And if you can’t have mortgage financing… life as we know it breaks down.” (B, 06:38)
  • “We’ve got 10, maybe 20 years to catch up to the rate of growth of fire risk.” (B, 07:21)
• Environmental Feedback Loops:
  • Suppression and climate change have changed fire behavior and intensity, increasing risk.
  • “All of those things obviously increase fire risk and when the fire is burning, increase the destructive nature.” (B, 05:35)

2. Wildfire Science: Causes & Climate Context

• Not Just Drought:
  • Wet winters actually create more vegetation, then hot summers dry it out, increasing fire risk.
  • “The biggest fires tend to happen in years where there’s a very wet winter… followed by a very hot and dry summer and fall—and those are actually the optimal fire conditions.” (B, 08:52)
• Fire Response Window:
  • Fire is a race against exponential growth; early intervention is critical.
  • Delay of even 15-30 minutes can mean the difference between knocking down a fire and it turning into a megafire.

3. Current Wildfire Response: Gaps & Limitations

• Detection Advances, Initial Response Lags:
  • Detection has improved via AI, cameras, satellites, and cell phone calls, but physical response is too slow and resource constrained. (B, 13:54)
  • “Even for [LA County], it can take 20, 30 minutes to get a helicopter there.” (B, 14:48)
  • Most early response is still ground crews with hand tools (“Pulaski”) and scarce, expensive helicopters.
  • “The difference between five minutes and two hours could be half an acre… and 200-300 acres. Which starts to become a major incident.” (B, 16:05)

4. What is Seneca? Technical Overview

• Seneca Product:

  • Large quadcopter “autonomous suppression copters,” deployed in strike teams of five; each carries 100+ lbs of foam (expands equivalently to ~5,000 lbs of water across strike team).
  • “You could think about it as a small swarm… of five very large autonomous suppression copters… not small drones, but aircraft the size of a car.” (B, 11:08; 33:39)
  • Rapid, distributed, autonomous launch—can reach remote fires in as little as five minutes.
  • “The best shot we have at initial attack is through autonomous firefighting aircraft.” (B, 12:42)

• Capabilities:

  • Designed for high wind operation: “Of course, it’s just a physics problem.” (B, 17:23)
  • Night operations possible—“The robots don’t care if it’s day or night. LIDAR doesn’t care, the IR cameras don’t care.” (B, 25:47)
  • Remote and autonomous operation; can cover areas for “mop up” (post-fire hotspots), heavy lifting, and prescribed burn oversight.

5. Use Cases Beyond Initial Attack

• Mop Up and Hotspot Verification:
  • Firefighters often spend hours searching for, hiking to, and extinguishing residual hotspots.
  • “It’s really hard. [With Seneca] you can cover so much more terrain than you could with people.” (B, 24:19)
• Prescribed Burns:
  • “If an ember jumps the line… it’s trivially easy to hit that from the air.” (B, 23:31)
  • Lower operational cost makes these missions feasible compared to manned helicopters.
• Night Operations:
  • No need for rest or risk to human pilots at night.
• Utilities/Agriculture:
  • Protects solar farms, power lines, ranchland—all at fire risk.

6. Autonomy & User Experience

• Seven Star Experience:

  • Landesberg describes Seneca’s philosophy of a “seven-star” user experience for first responders, prioritizing intuitive software—“so easy, it feels like magic.” (B, 28:24–32:01)
  • “To deliver that seven-star experience, you can take someone with safety training plus 5 or 10 minutes of training on the app…and they can now control a strike team of aircraft really effectively.” (B, 31:45)

• Not Just Retrofits:

  • Purpose-built aircraft—much larger and more robust than existing camera drones; designed for the mission and U.S.-made for resilience and security. (B, 33:11–33:56)
  • “We have to be good at building these in the U.S… an American resilience product.” (B, 34:18)

7. Manufacturing & Supply Chain

• American Sourcing:
  • Strong focus on U.S.-based manufacturing; avoids dependency on Chinese supply chains.
  • “We’re very proud to make it in the U.S.… This is a core part of our reason for being.” (B, 34:10)
  • “Mercifully, most of the thinking and sensing components you can [get in the US] … But some metals you just cannot.” (B, 35:56)

8. Business Model & Go To Market

• Sales Model:

  • Sells a strike team of five aircraft and launch module(s) to agencies, utilities, HOAs, and landowners.
  • Deployment scenarios: mobile (transported to incident) or remote (stationed in high-risk sites).
  • “Utilities start fires that create a hugely disproportionate amount of the overall damage. Of course we want those folks having them…” (B, 44:16)

• Regulatory:

  • “The FAA has been a great partner… part of our job is handling the complexity of who gets priority in the airspace.” (B, 42:38)
  • Multiple safety and “deconfliction” mechanisms protect airspace integrity.

• Scaling/Manufacturing:

  • Building capacity to produce double-digit aircraft per month in California. (B, 45:25)

9. Deployment & Funding

• Testing & Rollouts:
  • Piloted with agencies in multiple states; “will see them on fires for the first time this summer.” (B, 46:18)
• Funding:
  • $60 million Series A—the largest fire tech venture round to date.
  • “The partners we have there… are an extraordinary set of capital partners, many of whom I’ve worked with before…” (B, 46:54)
• Talent Call:
  • Actively hiring people “who feel called to use technology to reshape humans’ interactions with fire.” (B, 44:35–45:07)

10. Climate & Societal Impact

• Emission Impacts:
  • “Between 8 and 20% of global carbon emissions come from wildfires… If wildfire was a country, it’d be the third biggest emitter…” (B, 49:47)
  • “Dealing with the symptoms also helps deal with the cause.” (B, 50:19)
• Wildlife & Health Impacts:
  • “Habitat loss, chemicals into water, cancer rates among firefighters 20x normal population…” (B, 51:21)
  • “Nature is powerful, man. We can act like we are more powerful, but nature’s always more powerful.” (B, 51:47)

11. Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• Existential Stakes & Call to Action:
  • “We are not going to lose this fight... If you believe in humans… then that urgency can actually be a really good thing.” (B, 52:01)
  • “If we do our job really well, the bad version of the future doesn’t come to pass. You can really bend that arc.” (B, 53:28)
• Admiration for Firefighters:
  • “Those people are true heroes. Building a product that serves that group of individuals… makes it such a privilege.” (B, 53:37)
• On American Resilience:
  • “Can you imagine? There’s a big fire, you’re relying on this technology and, for whatever reason, there’s some entity abroad that can just prevent our most critical technology from functioning. Give me a break.” (B, 34:20)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Why wildfires, why now? - 02:39–07:21
• The exponential growth of fire risk, housing/insurance crisis - 04:59–07:21
• Misconceptions: drought vs. fuel load as drivers - 08:04–10:06
• How initial suppression works today - 10:47–17:08
• Seneca’s autonomous strike team introduction - 11:08–13:25
• What happens when wind, night, or inaccessible terrain block response? - 17:08–19:11, 25:47
• Product applications: mop up, prescribed burns, utilities - 20:03–27:09
• Seven-star user experience, autonomy - 28:24–32:01
• American manufacturing, supply chain - 33:11–37:02
• Business model & regulatory - 41:10–44:33
• Scaling & hiring - 44:33–46:07
• Deployment status & company funding - 46:18–48:23
• Environmental and social impact - 49:23–51:52
• Closing thoughts: urgency, privilege, heroes in firefighting - 51:58–54:09

Conclusion

This episode provides a compelling, urgent, and detailed look at the growing wildfire crisis, how Seneca’s technology offers a new paradigm for rapid, effective, and safe response, and the importance of resilience—in both technology infrastructure and the human spirit. Landesberg conveys both technical expertise and deep personal purpose, ending with a broad call to exceptional people to join an effort that could quite literally help preserve the fabric of American society and environment.