Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t sound like someone who’s disrupted an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company builds fire nozzles that increase suppression rates by up to 300 percent while conserving 67 percent of water. Sethi is matter-of-fact about this achievement, more focused on what’s next than what’s already been done. What comes next sounds much bigger than fire nozzles.
His path to firefighting doesn’t follow a tidy narrative. After earning his PhD at the University of Akron, where he researched surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech. That company developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and won Air Force Research Lab grants. Next, at SunPower, he developed new materials and processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. He then worked at TE Connectivity on devices with new adhesive formulations to enable faster manufacturing in the automotive industry.
Then came a challenge from his wife. The couple had moved from Ohio to the East Bay outside San Francisco in 2013. A few years later came the Thomas Fire. Then came the Camp Fire, then the Napa-Sonoma fires. The breaking point arrived in 2019. Sethi was traveling during evacuation warnings while his wife was home alone with their three-year-old daughter, facing a potential evacuation order. She told him he needed to fix the problem, otherwise he wasn’t a real scientist.
His background spanning nanotechnology, solar, semiconductors, and automotive had made his thinking bias-free and flexible. He had seen many industries and many different problems. He decided to try to fix this one.
In June 2020, he founded HEN Technologies in nearby Hayward. With National Science Foundation funding, he conducted computational fluid dynamics research, analyzing how water suppresses fire and how wind affects it. The result is a nozzle that controls droplet size precisely, manages velocity in new ways, and resists wind. In comparison videos, the difference is stark. At the same flow rate, HEN’s pattern and velocity control keep the stream coherent while traditional nozzles disperse.
But the nozzle is just the beginning. HEN has since expanded into monitors, valves, overhead sprinklers, and pressure devices, and is launching a flow-control device and discharge control systems this year. According to Sethi, each device contains custom-designed circuit boards with sensors and computing power. These designs turn standard hardware into smart, connected equipment. Altogether, HEN has filed 20 patent applications with half a dozen granted so far.
The real innovation is the system these devices create. HEN’s platform uses sensors at the pump to act as a virtual sensor in the nozzle, tracking when it’s on, how much water flows, and what pressure is required. The system captures precisely how much water was used for a given fire, how it was used, which hydrant was tapped, and what the weather conditions were.
This matters because fire departments can run out of water when there’s no communication between water suppliers and firefighters. It happened in the Palisades Fire and decades earlier in the Oakland Fire. When two engines connect to one hydrant, pressure variations can mean one engine suddenly gets nothing. In rural America, water tenders face logistical nightmares. If they can integrate water usage calculations with utility monitoring systems to optimize resource allocation, that’s a major win.
So HEN built a cloud platform with application layers. The system incorporates weather data and GPS in all devices. It can warn those on the front lines that the wind is about to shift and they should move their engines, or that a particular fire truck is running out of water.
The Department of Homeland Security has been asking for exactly this kind of system through its NERIS program, an initiative to bring predictive analytics to emergency operations. But you cannot have predictive analytics without good quality data, and you cannot have good quality data without the right hardware.
HEN is not monetizing that data yet. It is implementing data nodes, putting devices in as many systems as possible, building the data pipeline, and creating the data lake. Next year, it will start commercializing the application layer with its built-in intelligence.
If building a predictive analytics platform for emergency response sounds daunting, Sethi says actually selling it is tougher. He is proudest of HEN’s traction on that front. The market is tough because convincing the customers is like a business-to-consumer play, but the procurement cycle is business-to-business. You must make a product that resonates with the end user but still go through government purchasing cycles. HEN has cracked both.
The numbers bear this out. HEN launched its first products in the second quarter of 2023, lining up 10 fire departments and generating $200,000 in revenue. Revenue hit $1.6 million in 2024, then $5.2 million last year. This year, with 1,500 fire department customers, HEN is projecting $20 million in revenue.
HEN has competition. IDEX Corp sells hoses, nozzles, and monitors. Software companies like Central Square serve fire departments. A Miami company, First Due, which sells software to public safety agencies, announced a major funding round last August. But no company is doing exactly what HEN is trying to do.
Sethi says the constraint isn’t demand, but scaling fast enough. HEN serves the Marine Corps, US Army bases, Naval atomic labs, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Defense, and ships to 22 countries. It works through 120 distributors and recently qualified for GSA after a year-long vetting process, a federal seal of approval that makes it easier for military and government agencies to buy.
Fire departments buy about 20,000 new engines each year to replace aging equipment in a national fleet of 200,000. Once HEN is qualified on an engine, it becomes recurring revenue. Because the hardware generates data, revenue continues between purchase cycles.
HEN’s dual goal has required building a specific team. Its software lead was formerly a senior director who helped build Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. Other team members include a former NASA engineer and veterans from Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. Sethi admits he cannot answer every technical question, but he has strong teams that have been a blessing.
The software hints at where this gets interesting. While HEN is selling nozzles, it is amassing something more valuable: highly specific, real-world data about how water behaves under pressure, how flow rates interact with materials, how fire responds to suppression, and how physics works in active fire environments.
This is exactly what companies building so-called world models need. These AI systems construct simulated representations of physical environments to predict future states and require real-world, multimodal data from physical systems under extreme conditions. You cannot teach AI about physics through simulations alone. You need what HEN collects with every deployment.
Sethi won’t elaborate, but he knows what he’s sitting on. Companies training robotics and predictive physics engines would pay handsomely for this kind of real-world physics data.
Investors see it, too. Last month, HEN closed a $20 million Series A round, plus $2 million in venture debt. O’Neil Strategic Capital led the financing, with NSF, Tanas Capital, and z21 Ventures participating. The round brought the company’s total funding to more than $30 million.
Sethi is already looking ahead. He says the company will return to fundraising in the second quarter of this year.