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S4 Episode 4: Preventing Wildfires, Protecting Forests, with Carsten Brinkschulte of Dryad Networks

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TII s4e4 Matt Venning

Welcome to Episode 4.

My guest this week is Carsten Brinkschulte, founder and CEO of wildfire detection startup Dryad Networks. He’s a serial entrepreneur in Telecoms and launched Dryad in 2018, having recently sold his last business and was wondering what to do with his life. Fortunately, the stars aligned and he decided to use his background in Telecoms to create a connected network of smoke sensors in the forest that will send an alert as soon as the early smouldering of a forest fire is detected.

Having recently closed a successful Series A fundraise, they have been piloting the technology internationally and they are gearing up for larger scale distribution very soon.

I came across Dryad, which means “tree spirit” in Greek mythology, at the Climate Tech Show in London and immediately saw it as tackling a massive global problem in a very straightforward, practical way. Wildfires are one of the main causes of CO2 emissions, and numbers are continuing to increase as the earth gets warmer. Not to mention the devastating consequences on forestry and biodiversity. Dryad is on a mission to ultimately prevent them.

For more information, you can check out www.dryad.net and follow Carsten at linkedin.com/in/brinkschulte