Teams from across the world have competed to build transformative technology for wildfire detection and response. The winners were given hundreds of thousands of dollars to continue their development.

The teams were awarded the funds at the XPRIZE Wildfire Competition Awardee Ceremony at the New York City Fire Museum on Sept. 23. Nine of the 124 teams ended up winning prize money for their inventions focusing on either Space-Based Wildfire Detection & Intelligence and Autonomous Wildfire Response.

Along with the prize money, each winner will move forward to XPRIZE’s “Impact Phase,” which will use field trials to translate the technologies into real-world solutions for wildfire management.

“The awardee announcement marks an important milestone in the fight against destructive wildfires, but the breakthroughs that emerged from the competition are only the beginning,” XPRIZE said in a press release. “By catalyzing technological innovation and collaboration between innovators and wildfire experts, XPRIZE Wildfire has helped spur the development, adoption and investment needed to strengthen the accuracy of wildfire detection and the speed of response.”

The winners in the Space-Based Wildfire Detection & Intelligence section, according to the XPRIZE website, included:

• First Place – System Integration Awardee, $500,000: SIRIUS Wildfire Alliance
  SIRIUS Wildfire Alliance demonstrated comprehensive end-to-end and system integration methodology, integrating SAR and optical data to support fire characterization and spread modeling. 
• Second Place – Methodological Innovation Awardee, $250,000: Team Snuffed
  Team Snuffed developed a probabilistic data-fusion framework designed to provide transparent, auditable and uncertainty-aware wildfire detection, with strong firefighter-facing usability.
• Special Recognition, Commercial Viability, $100,000: MyRadar
  As a commercially mature team, MyRadar utilized upstream satellite acquisition and demonstrated spatial precision. 
• Special Recognition, Operational Deliverable, $100,000: DeepFire
  DeepFire demonstrated an operational fire-spread-alert capability designed to support wildfire detection and intelligence.
• Special Recognition, Innovative Algorithm Application, $100,000: Mayday.AI
  Mayday.AI applied an algorithm originally developed for volcanic-ash detection to identify wildfire smoke plumes through cloud cover.

The winners of the Autonomous Wildfire Response section included:

• First Place Awardee, $1.2 Million: Anduril Industries
  Anduril’s modular Lattice software platform provided a detection-to-suppression integrated pathway for cameras, sensors, and drones.
• Second Place Awardee, $800,000: Dryad Networks 
  Dryad’s Silvanet, a 170-sensor persistent field network, combined with their Silvaguard drones, demonstrated end-to-end autonomy.
• Third Place Awardee, $500,000: AURA Foresight 
  AURA successfully demonstrated autonomous and persistent detection, meeting the critical 10-minute detection gate.
• Lockheed Martin Accurate Detection & Intelligence Bonus Prize, $1,000,000: Anduril Industries
  Recognized for their rapid and precise multi-sensor detector performance.