MSIV Invests in San Anselmo’s Fire Aside
Q&A with Fire Aside Co-Founder & CEO Jason Brooks
Monday, October 23, 2023 from San Anselmo, CA
In 2021, Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures launched the North Bay’s first regional venture capital fund and began deploying capital into Marin + Sonoma’s most promising startup companies.
Today, we are excited to share details around our investment in San Anselmo’s Fire Aside, a software company supporting fire agencies in their mission to help communities adapt to wildfire risk.
Fire Aside’s innovative platform helps mitigate wildfire risk by providing community leaders tools that help with defensible space and home hardening work, wildfire mitigation inspections, fuel removal on residential properties, and financial assistance for homeowners. The platform is already supporting millions of high-risk properties across four states (California, Colorado, Oregon, and Nevada) and is changing the way communities assess and mitigate their risks.
MSIV is proud to be backing Fire Aside as part of the company’s initial outside financing in a round that was led by Convective Capital, a leading investor focused on wildfire resilience.
Why We Invested
Every single North Bay resident has been impacted by wildfire over the past six years and the reality of our climate future is that communities must take proactive and thoughtful approaches to mitigate this risk to keep their citizens safe.
The Fire Aside platform stands out because of its ability to do just that. Fire Aside was built in conjunction with leading Marin + Sonoma fire leaders, understanding from day one the challenges in managing and reducing wildfire risk and creating a robust set of tools to enable fire officials to better do their jobs.
Before Fire Aside, defensible space and home hardening inspections were more likely to be conducted with pen and paper than with a sophisticated tool. Now, with the Fire Aside platform, community wildfire programs can scale. Agencies can now utilize data-driven analytics to apply for funding, update their stakeholders, allocate resources more efficiently, and model future ignition events. Informed wildfire mitigation efforts must rely on actual, ground truth data at the parcel level, and Fire Aside enables this unlike any other platform.
Today, 18 of the 29 fire agencies across Sonoma + Marin rely on the Fire Aside platform. Now, the innovation that was incubated here, in a community that knows a thing or two about the real-world consequences of this challenge, now has the potential to ensure communities all around the world are more resilient to the risks posed by wildfire, and we are excited for our investment to support this next stage of growth for the platform.
MSIV Founder & Managing Partner Zachary Kushel sat down with Fire Aside Co-Founder & CEO Jason Brooks to discuss Fire Aside’s origins here in the North Bay community and its work to change the way communities adapt to wildfire risk.
Co-Founder & CEO Jason Brooks
ZK: Jason, where did the idea to build Fire Aside come from?
JB: This all started as I was trying to figure out how to better protect my own home here in Marin. I didn’t come from a fire background and I began talking to different experts, scientific researchers, and fire department officials. In that process I felt like I was hearing different priorities based on who I was talking to, and I wanted the guidance to be simplified and to get a very clear answer on the most cost effective actions I could take next to better protect my home.
Like every good entrepreneur, I began to think, “If I’m having this problem, others must be having the same problem.” With my co-founder, we started working to solve this for other people. The initial concept was to focus on a consumer-facing app and service to help homeowners. During the journey of building that and engaging with local fire leaders right here in the North Bay, we realized there was a great need for a pro-version of this tool, a platform that fire agencies could use as they go into the community and make clear recommendations to homeowners on how to adapt their home for wildfire. And it was out of that journey that Fire Aside was born.
ZK: Can you tell us more about your collaboration with local fire leaders and how this helped bring the Fire Aside vision to reality?
Jason with the North Bay field inspection team
JB: Wildland firefighting and innovation has been in Marin county’s DNA dating back to when the first forest fire district in the State of California was formed here in 1917. This means Fire Aside is surrounded by some of the best leaders and thinkers when it comes to wildfire. By example, we have leading wildfire researchers living in Marin and Sonoma. Even more impactful is that our local fire chiefs and community leaders were to the best of our knowledge the first in the nation to create a dedicated agency for wildfire prevention. We’re proud that Fire Safe Marin and the Marin Wildfire Prevention Authority were early customers and that they helped shape this product.
We’ve since expanded to collaborating with fire leaders in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino counties, and I’m excited about the work we recently launched with the city of Santa Rosa. Much of this effort involves using the Fire Aside platform to more efficiently direct federal and state resources to the community’s homeowners to increase the resilience of their homes against future wildfire events. Our network now covers into four U.S. states and we’re just getting started.
ZK: Can you share more specifics around how the Fire Aside tool helps communities become more resilient to wildfire?
JB: The platform is used by fire agencies and fire safe councils to support their activities when they go into their community, from evaluating structures home by home to understanding follow up needs to providing homeowners a personalized set of recommendations related to their property. Homeowners are busy people who are focused on their lives and families, so providing them with a link to a comprehensive report streamlines the process of connecting them with resources, such as financial grants and government-sponsored fuel removal days, which makes it more likely they take action to reduce the wildfire risk on their property.
At the community level, policymakers can now aggregate parcel-level data into neighborhood views, allowing them to understand their biggest risk factors and inform policy decisions that ultimately reduce risk to the community. In many cases, the fire agencies had created manual processes and tools out of necessity, which range from spreadsheets to paper checklists. I’m incredibly proud that Fire Aside eases this burden for communities and makes us all safer.
ZK: Tell us about the long-term vision with Fire Aside – what do you see for this platform’s evolution and success over the next 5-7 years?
JB: The harsh truth of climate change is that the threat of wildfire is now a national and global problem, as we’ve all been reminded with the recent events in Maui. We’ve already had inbound from states in the Midwest – there is so much work to be done in helping communities all around the world respond to and deal with the risks of wildfire, and we plan to expand our current four-state footprint to tackle that challenge.
We’re also looking at different tools and resources that help homeowners deal with climate change mitigation more broadly, and the challenges with insurance are front and center in this realm. There is an opportunity for the Fire Aside tool to accurately track that mitigation efforts have taken place and, at the homeowner’s discretion, to share these details with an insurance company as they wish to demonstrate a greater level of resilience when engaged with a renewal discussion. These are areas we plan to focus on as we push ahead.
ZK: What’s is like building Fire Aside here in the North Bay and what is your take on the potential of Marin + Sonoma’s growing startup community?
JB: My co-founder Don Moore and I are proud North Bay residents and feel privileged to be raising our families and building our company here. With such a high level of adoption of the Fire Aside tool by local fire agencies, every day I’m able to get up and feel that I made this community safer, and that we’ve reduced the amount of smoke that our kids have to breathe, and that is so powerful.
I’m also excited that mature entrepreneurs are having the opportunity to shine as part of this MSIV and North Bay startup community. At large, it is the 20-something founder wearing a hoodie that seems to get the most PR in this country, but here across Marin + Sonoma we have founders who have been around the world a few times that are getting it done as entrepreneurs. There is a benefit that experience brings to this journey, and I’m thrilled to join the MSIV portfolio and to have the opportunity to scale Fire Aside from here in Marin.
