Its founder is Sunny Shetty Hen TechnologiesDoesn’t sound like anyone disrupting an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company makes fire nozzles — specifically, nozzles that say they save 67% of the water and increase suppression rates by up to 300%. But Sethi is more focused on what’s next than what’s already been done, the subject of this achievement. And the next one sounds much bigger than a fire nozzle.

His path to firefighting does not follow a tidy narrative. After a PhD at the University of Akron, researching surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech, an organization that developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and won an Air Force Research Lab grant. Then, at SunPower, he developed new materials and processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. When he joined a company called TE Connectivity, he worked on devices with new adhesive formulations to enable rapid production in the automotive industry.

Then came a challenge from his wife. The two moved from Ohio to the East Bay outside of San Francisco in 2013. A few years later came the Thomas Fire — the only megafire they thought they’d ever see. Then came the Camp Fire, then the Napa-Sonoma Fire. Then, in 2019, came the breaking point. Sethi was traveling during the evacuation alert while his wife was home alone with their then three-year-old daughter, with no family nearby, facing a possible relocation order. “He was really mad at me,” recalls Sethi. “He’s like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to get this right, or you’re not a real scientist.'”

A background spanning nanotechnology, solar, semiconductor and automotive made his thinking “bias-free and flexible,” as he puts it. He has seen many industries, many different problems. why no Try to fix the problem?

In June 2020, he founded HEN Technologies in nearby Hayward. Funded by the National Science Foundation, he conducts computational fluid dynamics research, analyzing how water suppresses fire and how air affects it. The result: a nozzle that precisely controls droplet size, manages velocity in new ways, and resists wind.

In HEN’s comparison video, which Sethi shows me on a Zoom call, the difference is stark. It’s the same flow rate, he says, but Hen’s pattern and velocity controls keep the stream consistent while traditional nozzles disperse.

But the front end is just the beginning – what Sethi calls “muscles on the ground.” HEN has since expanded into monitors, valves, overhead sprinklers and pressure devices, and this year is introducing a flow-control device (“Stream IQ”) and discharge control system. According to Sethi, each device has custom-designed circuit boards with sensors and computing power—23 different designs that turn dumb hardware into smart, connected devices, some powered by Nvidia Orion Nano processors. In all, Sethi said, HEN has filed 20 patent applications with half a dozen granted so far.

The system that these devices create is the real innovation. HEN’s platform uses sensors on the pump to act as a virtual sensor on the nozzle, tracking exactly when it is on, how much water is flowing and what pressure is required. The system accurately captures how much water was used for a given fire, how it was used, which hydrant was tapped and what the weather conditions were.

Why it matters: Fire departments can run out of water otherwise, because there is no communication between water suppliers and firefighters. It happened in the Palisades fire. This is what happened in the Oakland fires decades ago. When two engines are connected to a hydrant, pressure variations can mean that one engine gets nothing if a fire suddenly breaks out. In rural America, water tenders, which are tankers delivering water from distant sources, face their own logistical nightmare. If they can integrate water usage calculations with their own utility monitoring systems to optimize resource allocation, that’s a huge win.

So HEN built a cloud platform with an application layer, which Sethi likened to what Adobe did with cloud infrastructure. Consider separate a la carte systems for fire captains, battalion chiefs and incident commanders. Hen’s system has weather information; All devices have GPS. It can alert people on the front lines that the wind is shifting and they better move their engines, or that a particular fire truck is running out of water.

The Department of Homeland Security is calling for just such measures NERIS programwhich is an initiative to bring predictive analytics to emergency operations. “But you can’t [predictive analytics] If you don’t have good quality data,” notes Sethi. “You can’t have good quality data if you don’t have the right hardware.”

HEN is not yet monetizing that data. It is implementing data nodes, deploying devices in as many systems as possible, creating data pipelines, creating data lakes. Next year, Sethi said, it will start commercializing the application layer with its built-in intelligence.

If building a predictive analytics platform for emergency response sounds daunting, Sethi says it’s actually a tougher sell, and he’s proud of HEN’s traction on that front.

“The hardest part of building this company is that this market is tough because it’s a B2C game when you think about convincing customers to buy, but the buying cycle is B2B,” he explains. “So you really have to build a product that resonates with people—with the end user—but you still have to go through the government procurement cycle, and we’ve cracked both.”

The numbers bear this out. HEN launched its first products to market in the second quarter of 2023, lining up 10 fire departments and generating $200,000 in revenue. Then word began to spread. Revenue hits $1.6 million in 2024, followed by $5.2 million last year. This year, Hein, which currently has 1,500 fire department customers, is projecting $20 million in revenue.

Hen certainly has competition. IDEX Corp, a public company, sells hoses, nozzles and monitors. Software companies like Central Square serve the fire department. A Miami company, First Do, which sells software to public safety agencies, has made a huge announcement $355 million round last august But neither company is “doing exactly what we’re trying to do,” Sethi insists.

Still, Sethi says the limitation isn’t demand — it’s scaling fast enough. HEN serves the Marine Corps, US Army bases, Naval Atomic Lab, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Defense, and ships to 22 countries. It works through 120 distributors and recently qualified for GSA (a federal seal of approval that makes purchasing easier for military and government agencies) after a year-long verification process.

Fire departments buy about 20,000 new engines each year to replace aging equipment in a national fleet of 200,000, so once HEN is eligible, it becomes recurring revenue (the concept), and because the hardware generates data, the revenue continues within the purchase cycle.

The dual purpose of HEN requires building a very specific team. Its software lead was previously a senior director who helped build Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. Other members of HEN’s 50-person team include a former NASA engineer and veterans from Tesla, Apple and Microsoft. “If you ask me technical questions, I won’t be able to answer everything,” admits Sethi with a laugh, “but I have a good team that [it] has been a blessing.”

In fact, it’s software that hints at where it gets interesting, because while HEN is selling nozzles, it’s also collecting something more valuable: data. Highly specific, real-world data on how water behaves under pressure, how flow rates interact with materials, how fire responds to suppression techniques, how physics work in an active fire environment.

Exactly what companies need to build the so-called global model. These AI systems that create simulated representations of the physical environment to predict future conditions require real-world, multimodal data from physical systems under extreme conditions. You cannot teach AI about physics through simulation alone. You need what HEN collects with each deployment.

Sethi won’t elaborate, but he knows what he’s sitting on. Companies offering robotics and predictive physics engine training will pay handsomely for this kind of real-world physics data.

Investors see that too. last monthHEN closed a $20 million Series A round and a $2 million venture loan from Silicon Valley Bank. O’Neil Strategic Capital led the financing with participation from NSFO, Tanas Capital, and z21 Ventures. This round brings the company’s total funding to more than $30 million.

Sethi, meanwhile, is already looking ahead. He said the company will return to fundraising in the second quarter of this year.