Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t sound like someone who has disrupted an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company builds fire nozzles — specifically, nozzles it says increase suppression rates by up to 300% while saving 67% of water. But Sethi is matter-of-fact about this performance, more focused on what’s next than what’s already been done. And the next thing sounds much bigger than fire nozzles.
His path to firefighting does not follow a tidy narrative. After earning his PhD at the University of Akron, where he researched surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech, an outfit that developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and won Air Force Research Lab grants. Next, at SunPower, he developed new materials and processes for shingled solar modules. When he next landed at a company called TE Connectivity, he worked on devices with new adhesive formulations to enable faster manufacturing in the automotive industry.
Then came a challenge from his wife. The two had 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’d ever seen, they thought. Then came the campfire, then the Napa-Sonoma fires. The breaking point came in 2019. Sethi traveled under evacuation warnings while his wife was home alone with their then three-year-old daughter, no family nearby, and faced a potential evacuation order. “She was really mad at me,” Sethi recalls. “She’s like, ‘Dude, you’ve got to fix this or you’re not a real scientist.'”
A background spanning nanotechnology, solar energy, semiconductors and cars had made his thinking “unbiased and flexible”, as he puts it. He had seen so many industries, so many different problems. Why not try to solve the problem?
In June 2020, he founded HEN Technologies (for high efficiency nozzles) in nearby Hayward. With National Science Foundation funding, he conducted computational fluid dynamics research, analyzing how water suppresses fire and how wind affects it. The result: a nozzle that precisely controls droplet size, controls speed in new ways and resists wind.
In the HEN comparison video that Sethi shows me over a Zoom call, the difference is stark. It’s the same flow rate, he says, but HEN’s pattern and speed control keeps the flow consistent while traditional nozzles disperse.
But the nozzle is just the beginning—what Sethi calls “the muscle on the ground.” HEN has since expanded into monitors, valves, overhead sprinklers and pressure devices, and this year is launching a flow control unit (“Stream IQ”) and discharge control systems. According to Sethi, each device contains custom-designed circuit boards with sensors and computing power — 23 different designs that turn dumb hardware into smart, connected gear, some powered by Nvidia Orion Nano processors. All told, Sethi says, HEN has filed 20 patent applications with half a dozen approved so far.
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The real innovation is the system these devices create. HEN’s platform uses sensors at the pump to act as a virtual sensor in the nozzle, tracking exactly when it is on, how much water is flowing and what pressure is required. The system records exactly how much water was used for a given fire, how it was used, which hydrant was tapped and what the weather conditions were like.
Why it matters: Fire departments can otherwise run out of water because there is no communication between water suppliers and firefighters. It happened in the Palisades fire. It happened in Oakland Four decades earlier. When two engines are connected to a hydrant, pressure variations can mean that one engine suddenly gets nothing as a fire continues to grow. In rural America, water tenders, which are tankers that transport water from distant sources, face their own logistical nightmares. If they can integrate water usage calculations with their own supply monitoring systems to optimize resource allocation, that’s a huge win.
So HEN built a cloud platform with an application layer, which Sethi likens to what Adobe did with cloud infrastructure. Think individual à la carte systems for fire captains, battalion commanders and incident commanders. HEN’s system has weather data; it has GPS in all devices. It can alert those on the front lines that the wind is changing and they better move their engines, or that a particular fire truck is running out of water.
The Department of Homeland Security has requested just this kind of system through its NERIS program, an initiative to bring predictive analytics to emergency operations. “But you can’t have that [predictive analytics] unless you have good quality data,” notes Sethi. “You can’t have good quality data unless you have the right hardware.”
HEN does not monetize this data yet. It is implementing data nodes, putting devices in as many systems as possible, building data pipeline, creating the data lake. Next year, Sethi says, it will begin commercializing the application layer with its built-in intelligence.
If building a predictive analytics platform for emergency response sounds daunting, Sethi says selling it is actually harder, and he’s most proud of HEN’s traction on that front.
“The hardest part of building this business 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 make a product that resonates with people—with the end user—but you still have to go through public procurement cycles, and we’ve cracked both of those.”
The figures confirm this. HEN launched its first products on the market in the second quarter of 2023, fielding 10 fire departments and generating $200,000 in revenue. Then word began to spread. Revenue reached $1.6 million in 2024, then $5.2 million last year. This year, Hen, which currently has 1,500 fire department customers, expects $20 million in revenue.
Of course, SHE has competition. IDEX Corp, a public company, sells hoses, nozzles and screens. Software companies like Central Square serve the fire department. A Miami company, First Due, which sells software to public safety agencies, announced a massive $355 million round last August. But no 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 labs, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Defense and ships to 22 countries. It works through 120 distributors and recently qualified for the GSA after a year-long vetting process (it’s a federal stamp of approval that makes it easier for military and government agencies to buy).
The fire department buys about 20,000 new engines each year to replace aging equipment in a national fleet of 200,000, so once the HEN is qualified, it becomes recurring revenue (is the idea) and because the hardware generates data, revenue continues between purchase cycles.
HEN’s dual goals have required building a very specific team. Its head of software was previously a senior executive 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 wouldn’t be able to answer everything,” Sethi admits with a laugh, “but I have such good teams that [it] has been a blessing.”
It’s actually the software that hints at where this gets interesting, because while HEN sells nozzles, it collects something more valuable: data. Very specific, real-world data on how water behaves under pressure, how flow rates interact with materials, how fire responds to suppression techniques, how physics works in active fire environments.
This is exactly what companies building so-called world models need. These AI systems, which construct simulated representations of physical environments to predict future states, require multimodal real-world data from physical systems under extreme conditions. You cannot teach AI about physics through simulations alone. You need what HEN collects with each deployment.
Sethi won’t elaborate, but he knows what he’s getting into. Companies training robotics and predictive physics engines would pay handsomely for this kind of real-world physical data.
Investors see it too. Last month, HEN closed a $20 million Series A round plus $2 million in venture debt from Silicon Valley Bank. O’Neil Strategic Capital led the financing, with NSFO, Tanas Capital and z21 Ventures participating. The round brought the company’s total funding to more than $30 million.
Sethi, meanwhile, is already looking ahead. He says the company will return to fundraising in the second quarter of this year.