wildfire-recovery
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Mast Reforestation Learned Planting Trees Wasn’t the Hard Part - Financing the Forest Was
Mast began with a fleet of seed-firing drones. Then it discovered the expensive truth: after a megafire, the real bottlenecks are native seed, nursery space, dead wood and patient capital - so it bought the supply chain and buried the business model underground.
Bryce Jones
Bryce Jones is the CEO and co-founder of Flash Forest, a Toronto-based cleantech startup that uses autonomous drones, AI, GIS mapping and biodegradable seed pods to replant forests faster and more cheaply than traditional hand-planting. A former tree planter and biology graduate from British Columbia, Jones launched Flash Forest in 2019 after seeing how far reforestation methods lagged behind industrial logging technology. The company's stated goal is to plant one billion trees by 2028, with a focus on land that is unsafe or uneconomical for human crews, including post-wildfire terrain.
Flash Forest
Flash Forest is a Toronto-based reforestation company that uses drones, proprietary biological seed pods, aerial mapping, and machine learning to replant forests faster and cheaper than traditional hand-planting. Founded in 2019, it deploys aerial and ground-based systems to restore land degraded by wildfire and logging, and pairs planting with a forestry intelligence service that surveys and monitors forests. The company has planted more than 3 million trees and aims to reach one billion by 2028.
Vikas Enti
Vikas Enti is the co-founder and CEO of Reframe Systems, an Andover, Massachusetts startup using robotic microfactories to build net-zero, climate-resilient homes faster, cheaper, and with a fraction of the carbon of conventional construction. A veteran of Amazon Robotics, where he spent roughly a decade helping scale a fleet of more than half a million warehouse robots, Enti left logistics to point the same systems thinking at the housing crisis. He founded Reframe in 2022 with two former Amazon colleagues, raised a $20M Series A in 2025, and is deploying microfactories from Massachusetts to wildfire-hit Los Angeles.
Nikki Pechet
Nikki Pechet is the Co-Founder and CEO of Homebound, a tech-enabled homebuilder she launched in 2018 after wildfires devastated thousands of homes in Northern California. A veteran of Bain & Company and Thumbtack, she has built Homebound into a platform that digitizes every step of construction — from custom home design to permitting to build tracking — and has raised over $400 million in equity and real estate capital. She closed her Series A days after giving birth to her third child and has expanded Homebound across California, Colorado, Texas, and Florida, with aspirations to become the Amazon of homes.