HEN Technologies Reinvents Firefighting Equipment and Builds a Data Platform

Sunny Sethi, the founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t present himself like someone who has upended a sector that has barely changed since the 1960s. His company makes fire nozzles — a product category that rarely attracts attention. Yet HEN’s nozzles are designed to extinguish fires up to three times faster than conventional alternatives while using roughly two-thirds less water. Sethi speaks about that achievement without flourish, far more interested in what comes next than in what has already been accomplished. And, by his account, what comes next is much larger than hardware.

Sethi’s route into firefighting was anything but straightforward. After earning his PhD at the University of Akron, where his research focused on surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech. This company developed carbon nanotube technologies and secured grants from the Air Force Research Laboratory. He later joined SunPower, where he worked on new materials and manufacturing processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. His next stop was TE Connectivity, where he helped develop devices using new adhesive formulations to speed up automotive manufacturing.

The turning point came not from industry, but from home. After moving with his wife from Ohio to the East Bay near San Francisco in 2013, wildfires became an increasingly constant presence. The Camp Fire followed the Thomas Fire, then the Napa-Sonoma fires. In 2019, during evacuation warnings, Sethi was travelling for work while his wife was home alone with their three-year-old daughter, with no nearby family, and the possibility of being ordered to evacuate. “She was really mad at me,” Sethi recalls. “She’s like, ‘Dude, you need to fix this, otherwise you’re not a real scientist.’”

With experience spanning nanotechnology, solar, semiconductors, and automotive manufacturing, Sethi says his thinking had become “bias free and flexible.” He had seen many industries tackle deeply rooted problems. He began to ask why firefighting couldn’t be rethought the same way.

In June 2020, he founded HEN Technologies — short for High-Efficiency Nozzles — in Hayward, California. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Seth conducted computational fluid dynamics research to examine how water suppresses fire and how wind alters that interaction. The work led to a nozzle that precisely controls droplet size, manages velocity in novel ways, and resists wind dispersion.

In side-by-side demonstrations, the difference is clear. At the same flow rate, HEN’s nozzle maintains a coherent stream, while traditional nozzles break apart and disperse. But Sethi is quick to stress that the nozzle itself is only the starting point — what he describes as “the muscle on the ground.”

Since then, HEN has expanded into monitors, valves, overhead sprinklers, and pressure-control devices. This year, it is launching a flow-control system called Stream IQ, along with discharge-control systems. According to Sethi, each of these products contains custom-designed circuit boards with sensors and onboard computing — 23 different board designs in total — turning what was once passive equipment into connected, intelligent hardware.NVIDIA Orion Nano processors power some systems. Altogether, HEN has filed 20 patent applications, with six already granted.

The deeper innovation lies in how these components work together. HEN’s platform places sensors at the pump that function as virtual sensors within the nozzle itself, tracking when it is active, how much water is flowing, and the required pressure. The system records how much water is used at a fire, how it is deployed, which hydrant is used, and the weather conditions at the time.

That information addresses a longstanding problem in firefighting: the lack of real-time coordination between firefighters and water suppliers. Departments can and do run out of water, as seen during the Palisades Fire and decades earlier during the Oakland Fire. When two engines draw from a single hydrant, pressure fluctuations can cause one to lose supply as a fire grows suddenly. In rural areas, water tenders — tanker trucks that shuttle water from distant sources — face additional logistical challenges. Integrating water usage data with utility monitoring systems could significantly improve resource allocation.

To that end, HEN built a cloud-based platform with multiple application layers. Sethi compares the approach to how Adobe built its cloud ecosystem, offering tailored tools for roles ranging from fire captains to battalion chiefs and incident commanders. The system incorporates weather data and GPS across all devices, allowing it to warn crews about shifting winds, suggest repositioning engines, or flag when a truck is nearing empty.

This is the kind of capability sought by the Department of Homeland Security through its NERIS initiative, which aims to bring predictive analytics to emergency operations. “But you can’t have predictive analytics unless you have good quality data,” Sethi says. “You can’t have good quality data unless you have the right hardware.”

Building the technology was only part of the challenge. Selling it, Sethi says, was harder. Firefighting sits in an unusual market dynamic: adoption depends on individual end users, but purchasing runs through long government procurement cycles. “You have to build something firefighters actually want to use,” he explains, “but you still have to navigate public-sector buying processes. We’ve managed to do both.”

The results suggest traction. HEN launched its first products in the second quarter of 2023, signing 10 fire departments and generating $200,000 in revenue. Sales accelerated quickly. Revenue reached $1.6 million in 2024, climbed to $5.2 million the following year, and the company is projecting $20 million this year. HEN now counts roughly 1,500 fire department customers.

Competition exists. IDEX Corp sells hoses, nozzles, and monitors, while software vendors like Central Square serve fire departments. Miami-based First Due raised a $355 million round last August. Still, Sethi argues that no competitor is combining hardware, software, and data as HEN is.

Demand, he says, is not the bottleneck. Scaling is. HEN serves the U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Army bases, naval atomic laboratories, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Defence, and customers in 22 countries. The company works through 120 distributors and recently qualified for the General Services Administration, a year-long vetting process that simplifies purchasing for federal agencies.

Fire departments replace roughly 20,000 engines each year within a national fleet of about 200,000 vehicles. Once qualified, HEN expects recurring revenue from those replacement cycles — and ongoing revenue from the data generated between purchases.

That dual focus has shaped the company’s team. HEN’s software lead previously helped build Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. Its roughly 50-person staff includes a former NASA engineer and veterans from Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. “I don’t have to answer every technical question,” Sethi says. “That’s the strength of having the right people.”

Ultimately, it is the software and data that point toward a larger opportunity. While HEN sells nozzles and equipment, it is also collecting detailed, real-world data on how water behaves under pressure, how flow rates interact with materials, and how fires respond to suppression — all under extreme conditions.

That kind of data is critical for companies developing so-called world models: AI systems designed to simulate physical environments and predict future states. Simulations alone are not enough; they require real-world, multimodal inputs. HEN’s deployments generate exactly that.

Sethi is cautious about elaborating, but acknowledges the value. Companies working on robotics or predictive physics systems would be willing to pay significantly for access to such datasets.

Investors have taken notice. Last month, HEN closed a $20 million Series A round, along with $2 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank. The financing was led by O’Neil Strategic Capital, with participation from NSFO, Tanas Capital, and z21 Ventures, bringing total funding to more than $30 million.

Sethi is already thinking ahead. He says the company plans to return to the fundraising market in the second quarter of this year, as it continues building what he believes could become not just a new firefighting standard, but a valuable foundation for future AI systems.