AI Startup That Raised $81 Million to Detect Wildfires Bamboozled by Clouds, Still Relies on Humans

It's boom time for AI startups. Across the world, enterprising tech types are being rewarded with millions for forcing AI into all kinds of gadgets, like an autonomous lawnmower, an AI-powered robo-mattress, and even an AI-enabled toilet.

While the vast majority of even the most well-funded AI startups tend to collapse like houses of cards, VC spending on outlandish techno slop — like the Lemonflow, a "voice-based AI agent for charging infrastructure" — isn't slowing down. In the first three months of 2025 alone, AI startups accounted for $52 billion, or 41 percent of all global venture capital investments, including a record-smashing $40 billion to OpenAI.

And with AI investors are content to spend like sailors, one startup by the name of Pano is raking in the dough.

Founded in 2019 in San Francisco, Pano calls itself the "leader in early wildfire detection and intelligence." Basically, it's a camera plugged into a large language model (LLM) meant to detect early warning signs of wildfires.

Pano recently completed a Series B funding round of about $44 million, according to the Wall Street Journal, a cushy sum to add to its $37 million in earlier funding. It likewise has over $100 million worth of government contracts in force with emergency agencies, public utility companies, and state and local governments across the US, Canada, and Australia.

The company's co-founder, Sonia Kastner, told the WSJ she takes direct inspiration from the way weapons tech companies have partnered with the government in recent months. "We need to replicate that in the wildfire space," she said, indicating that wildfires are no longer a devastating threat, but a lucrative industry to game for profit.

On the surface, Pano's efforts are laudable. The startup purports to detect wildfire smoke during the day and heat signatures during the night across vast tracks of remote land, alerting first responders to early threats.

However, there are a few problems with Pano's AI solutionism. Like, for example, its struggle to identify wildfires from clouds, dust, and controlled burns. Thanks to these false flags, humans remain an essential part of the chain, making Pano seem less like a passive AI tool and more like a for-profit CCTV network.

Zooming out a bit beyond Pano itself, the public-private tech partnership represents a long and perfidious trend in which crucial public utilities are outsourced to the private market — a dynamic which tech moguls and their backers crave. With wildfires, for example, what was once a vast array of federally organized Civilian Conservation Corps lookout towers has now become a scattered mess of profit-driven satellite startups and "Drones as a Service" subscription models.

What happens if Pano goes insolvent, or decides to start upcharging for its crucial services? And on the flipside, who is holding Pano accountable should it be found to infringe on the privacy of remote or indigenous communities, or fail to do its job of detecting fires effectively?

With the Trump administration exploring more and more ways to outsource the country's emergency services to tech companies, Pano certainly won't be the last bizarro AI startup we hear about. Let's just hope the humans behind the wheel know the difference between a nimbus cloud and a plume of smoke.

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