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⚡ WHAT'S AT STAKE TODAY ⚡

1. 🔥💰 This founder cracked firefighting — now he's creating an AI gold mine
2. 💰🚀 Synthesia hits $4B valuation, lets employees cash out
3. 🏔️💻 How did Davos turn into a tech conference?
4. 🧠🔬 Who's behind AMI Labs, Yann LeCun's 'world model' startup
5. 📚👋 Science fiction writers, Comic-Con say goodbye to AI
6. 🤝🤖 Humans& thinks coordination is the next frontier for AI, and they're building a model to prove it
7. 💬🔗 ChatGPT is pulling answers from Elon Musk's Grokipedia
8. 🌩️🔮 Nvidia's new AI weather models probably saw this storm coming weeks ago
9. ⚖️🏢 Legal AI giant Harvey acquires Hexus as competition heats up in legal tech

HEN Technologies transforms firefighting hardware into AI-powered data goldmine

This founder cracked firefighting — now he's creating an AI gold mine

Sunny Sethi doesn't sound like someone who's revolutionized an industry unchanged since the 1960s. The founder of HEN Technologies builds fire nozzles that extinguish fires three times faster while using two-thirds less water. But for Sethi, this breakthrough is just the beginning of something much bigger.

His journey to firefighting began with diverse expertise spanning nanotechnology, solar energy, and automotive manufacturing. After earning his PhD at the University of Akron, he founded ADAP Nanotech, worked at SunPower on photovoltaic modules, and developed adhesive formulations at TE Connectivity. This varied background made his thinking "bias-free and flexible," he explains.

The catalyst came during California's devastating wildfires. After moving to the East Bay in 2013, Sethi and his wife witnessed the Thomas Fire, Camp Fire, and Napa-Sonoma fires. The breaking point arrived in 2019 when Sethi was traveling during evacuation warnings while his wife stayed home alone with their three-year-old daughter. "She was really mad at me," Sethi recalls. "She's like, 'Dude, you need to fix this, otherwise you're not a real scientist.'"

In June 2020, he founded HEN Technologies (High-Efficiency Nozzles) in Hayward. Using National Science Foundation funding, he conducted computational fluid dynamics research to understand how water suppresses fire and wind affects suppression. The result: nozzles that precisely control droplet size, manage velocity, and resist wind interference.

But nozzles are just "the muscle on the ground." HEN has expanded into monitors, valves, overhead sprinklers, and pressure devices, launching Stream IQ flow-control systems this year. Each device contains custom circuit boards with sensors and computing power—23 different designs powered by Nvidia Orion Nano processors that transform basic hardware into smart, connected equipment.

The real innovation lies in the integrated system these devices create. HEN's platform uses pump sensors to track exactly when nozzles activate, water flow rates, required pressure, and weather conditions. This addresses a critical problem: fire departments running out of water due to poor communication between suppliers and firefighters—an issue that plagued both the recent Palisades Fire and Oakland Fire decades earlier.

HEN built a cloud platform with application layers for fire captains, battalion chiefs, and incident commanders. The system incorporates weather data and GPS tracking, warning frontline responders when wind shifts threaten their positions or when trucks are running low on water. This aligns with the Department of Homeland Security's NERIS program, which seeks predictive analytics for emergency operations.

The market challenge combines B2C customer convincing with B2B procurement cycles. "You have to really make a product that resonates with people — with the end user — but you still have to go through government purchasing cycles, and we have cracked both of those," Sethi explains.

The numbers prove HEN's success. After launching in Q2 2023 with 10 fire departments and $200,000 revenue, growth accelerated dramatically: $1.6 million in 2024, $5.2 million last year, and projecting $20 million this year. HEN now serves 1,500 fire departments globally, including the Marine Corps, Army bases, NASA, and Abu Dhabi Civil Defense across 22 countries.

While competitors like IDEX Corp and First Due exist, none match HEN's integrated approach. The company recently qualified for GSA federal purchasing, opening recurring revenue opportunities as fire departments replace aging equipment in their 200,000-vehicle national fleet.

HEN's 50-person team includes Adobe's former cloud infrastructure senior director, NASA engineers, and veterans from Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. This expertise hints at the company's true value proposition: data collection.

Every deployment generates highly specific, real-world data about water behavior under pressure, flow rate interactions, fire suppression physics, and extreme environmental conditions. This information proves invaluable for companies building AI world models—systems requiring authentic, multimodal data from physical environments under extreme conditions to predict future states accurately.

Investors recognize this potential. HEN recently closed a $20 million Series A round plus $2 million venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank, led by O'Neil Strategic Capital with participation from NSFO, Tanas Capital, and z21 Ventures. Total funding exceeds $30 million, with plans for additional fundraising in Q2 this year.

While Sethi won't elaborate on the data monetization strategy, he understands what he's built: a platform that transforms firefighting equipment into an AI training goldmine, positioning HEN at the intersection of emergency response and artificial intelligence.

Google expands AI app-building tool to 15 countries

Google launches its AI vibe-coding app Opal in 15 more countries

Google is expanding Opal, its AI-powered no-code app builder, to 15 new countries including Canada, India, Japan, and Brazil. The tool allows users to create mini web applications using text prompts, surprising Google with the sophistication of early creations.

The platform uses Google's AI models to generate apps based on user descriptions. Creators can customize workflows through a visual editor, publish their apps online, and share them publicly. Google has improved Opal's performance, reducing creation time from five seconds to nearly instant and enabling parallel processing for complex workflows.

🎙️ The Supercharged Podcast Is Growing

Conversations with the People Building the AI Future

The Supercharged Podcast is becoming a place where real conversations about AI happen — beyond hype, tools, or surface-level takes.

We sit down with industry leaders, founders, builders, and operators who are actively using AI — or building AI-first businesses — to understand how it’s actually changing the way work gets done.

From strategy and systems to experimentation and execution, these are practical, honest conversations with people shaping what comes next.

👉 Explore the Supercharged Podcast

Harvey acquires Hexus to accelerate legal AI offerings amid competition.

⚡ Let’s Make AI Actually Useful:
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AI has potential — but generic advice rarely helps.

What would be genuinely valuable for AI to do in your industry right now?

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