A San Francisco startup that decided forest fuel treatment shouldn't run on clipboards and hand-flagged boundaries - so it built sensors, tablets, and software instead.
The mark. A wordmark for a company that wants to make prevention move as fast as fire does - photographed here the way you'd photograph anything you respect: straight on, no gimmicks.
Here is a fact that sounds made up but isn't: the United States is on track to absorb something like $20 trillion in wildfire damage over the next two decades. That is a number large enough to make a spreadsheet blush. And here is the genuinely strange part - most of the fixes are known. You thin overgrown forests, you clear the fuel, you do the unglamorous mechanical work of keeping a landscape from turning into a tinderbox. The problem was never the theory. The problem is that the work happens slowly, expensively, and one hand-marked tree at a time.
Earth Force Technologies, founded in 2022 and headquartered in San Francisco, looked at that gap and asked the kind of question that founds companies: why does fuel treatment still run on clipboards, spray paint, and boundary flags? Forestry is one of the last industries where a crew can spend days marking which trees to cut, then hope the report that comes back matches what actually happened in the field. It is a business drowning in manual steps, and manual steps are the enemy of scale.
So the company built software and sensors to eat those steps. Its two flagship products have plain names, which is a good sign in a sector prone to grandiosity. "Guide" is an in-cabin tablet, wired to precision sensors, that gives a machine operator real-time maps, alerts, and tree-level insight - a sort of turn-by-turn navigation for thinning a forest, making sure the prescription is met and the boundary lines are respected while the work is live rather than after the fact.
"Portal," the second product, is the desk-side counterpart. It is a web application that automates the reporting that used to eat a forester's evenings, letting a project administrator watch progress and impact remotely and, crucially, oversee far more acres without losing the thread of ground truth. The premise is almost arithmetic: if one administrator can credibly manage many more acres, the whole enterprise of prevention gets cheaper and faster at exactly the moment the country needs it to.
Wrapped around both is a connectivity and teleoperation layer - field sensors, precision GPS, and remote-controlled machinery for material handling, fire monitoring, and spot-fire suppression. The teleoperation angle is where Earth Force flips a familiar script. Remote-controlled machines are usually pitched as a way to cut labor. Earth Force pitches them as a way to keep humans in safe, comfortable workstations and out of the path of the very hazard they're trying to prevent.
That framing - technology as a way to create better jobs rather than erase them - is not incidental marketing. It is baked into who the company sells to and who backed it, and it is the reason a two-year-old startup is being taken seriously by people who manage millions of acres of public land.
"Fire prevention investments pay off many times over, but aren't happening at the pace and scale that communities need."
An in-cabin tablet paired with precision sensors, giving operators real-time maps, alerts, and tree-level insight so treatment prescriptions are met and boundaries observed while the work is happening - not audited afterward.
A web application that automates field reporting, letting administrators remotely assess progress and impact and oversee far more acres while staying close to ground-truth data.
Field-based sensors, precision GPS, and remote-controlled machinery for material handling, fire monitoring, and spot-fire suppression - letting operators work from safe, comfortable workstations.
Landscape-scale project preparation and optimization that strips out manual tasks like tree marking and boundary flagging to accelerate how quickly treatments get deployed.
Dawe is a serial operator with an engineer's resume - a Stanford manufacturing engineering degree and a master's in engineering-economic systems, plus a Harvard MBA. Before forests, he lived in shared mobility: founding CEO of C12 Energy, board member and CEO at Scoot Networks, and VP of new ventures at Bird. The through-line is running physical, operations-heavy systems at scale. Earth Force is that same instinct pointed at a hazard that gets harder to ignore every summer.
Earth Force is a B2B company, and its buyers are the institutions holding the map: state and federal governments, resource conservation districts, and stewardship organizations responsible for enormous tracts of forested land. These are groups under real pressure to run fuels-reduction programs and short on the tooling to do it at scale. For them, the value proposition is not a gadget - it is the ability to cover more acres, prove the work happened, and keep crews safer while doing it. Among the collaborators Earth Force points to are the National Forest Foundation and the federal forest-management world that defines the market.
Earth Force keeps a low public video footprint. These searches surface the most relevant founder talks, product demos, and coverage - approximate pointers, not official channels.
Find teleoperation and fuel-treatment demo footage.
Sources: earthforce.io, GlobeNewswire seed announcement (Nov 2022), LinkedIn, Crunchbase, PitchBook, Climatebase. Funding and team figures are approximate and reflect the most recent public reporting.