Sunny Sethi, founder HEN technologyunlike the industry disruptors that have remained unchanged since the 1960s. His company makes fire nozzles – specifically, a nozzle that he says increases suppression rates by 300% while saving 67% of water. But Sethi really cares about this achievement, focusing more on what he’s going to do than what he’s already done. And what comes next sounds bigger than a fire nozzle.
His path to firefighting doesn’t follow a neat narrative. After earning his PhD at the University of Akron, studying surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech, an outfit that developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and won an Air Force Research Lab grant. Next, at SunPower, he developed new materials and processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. When he landed next at a company called TE Connectivity, he worked on devices with new adhesive formulations to make manufacturing faster in the automotive industry.
Then came the challenge from his wife. Both had moved from Ohio to the East Bay outside San Francisco in 2013. A few years later came the Thomas Fire – the only megafire they had ever seen, they thought. Then came the Camp Fire, then the Napa-Sonoma fires. Then, in 2019, came the breaking point. Sethi was traveling during an evacuation alert while his wife was alone at home with their three-year-old daughter, with no family nearby, facing an evacuation order. “He was really mad at me,” Sethi recalled. “He was like, ‘Mom, you have to fix this, or you’re not a real scientist.'”
His background in nanotechnology, solar, semiconductors, and automotive has made his mind “bias-free and flexible,” as he puts it. He has seen many industries, many different problems. why not trying to fix the problem?
In June 2020, he founded HEN Technologies (for high efficiency nozzles) in nearby Hayward. With funding from the National Science Foundation, he conducted computational fluid dynamics research, analyzing how water reduces fire and how it affects wind. The result: a nozzle that precisely controls droplet size, regulates velocity in a new way, and resists wind.
In the HEN comparison video, which Sethi shared via Zoom call, the difference is stark. The same flow rate, he says, but HEN’s pattern and velocity control keep the flow coherent while traditional nozzles spread.
But the muzzle is just the beginning — what Sethi calls “muscles on the ground.” HEN began developing monitors, valves, overhead sprinklers, and pressure devices, and launched a flow control device (“Stream IQ”) and a discharge control system this year. According to Sethi, each device contains a specially designed circuit board with sensors and computing power—23 different designs that turn dumb hardware into smart, connected appliances, some powered by Nvidia Orion Nano processors. In all, Sethi said, HEN has filed 20 patent applications with half a dozen granted so far.
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The real innovation is the system created by these devices. The HEN platform uses sensors on the pump to act as virtual sensors on the nozzle, tracking exactly when it’s on, how much water is flowing, and what pressure is needed. The system accurately determines how much water is used for a given fire, how it is used, which hydrant is tapped, and weather conditions.
Why it matters: Fire departments can run out of water, because there is no communication between the water supplier and the firefighters. It happened in the Palisades Fire. This happened in the Oakland Fire decades earlier. When two engines are connected to one hydrant, pressure variations can mean one engine suddenly gets nothing as the fire continues to grow. In rural America, water tenders, which are tankers that haul water from distant sources, face their own logistical nightmare. If it can combine water usage calculations with the utility’s own monitoring system to optimize resource allocation, that’s a big win.
So HEN builds a cloud platform with an application layer, which Sethi likens to what Adobe does with its cloud infrastructure. Think of an Individual à la carte system for fire captains, battalion chiefs, and incident commanders. The HEN system has weather data; has GPS on all devices. It can warn people on the front lines that the wind is about to shift and it’s better to move their engines, or that a certain fire truck is running out of water.
The Department of Homeland Security has requested exactly this type of system through its NERIS programwhich is an initiative to bring predictive analytics to emergency operations. “But you can’t have (predictive analytics) unless you have good quality data,” notes Sethi. “You can’t have good quality data unless you have the right hardware.”
HEN has not monetized the data. It’s implementing data nodes, putting devices in as many systems as possible, building data pipelines, creating data lakes. Next year, Sethi said, it will start commercializing the application layer with built-in intelligence.
If building a predictive analytics platform for emergency response sounds daunting, Sethi says it’s a tougher sell, and he’s most proud of HEN’s appeal on that front.
“The most difficult part of building this company is that this market is difficult because it is a B2C cycle when you think about convincing customers to buy, but the cycle of purchasing goods or services is B2B,” he explained. “So you have to make a product that’s relevant to people – to the end user – but you still have to go through the government buying cycle, and we’ve done both of those.”
The numbers show this. HEN launched its first product to the market in the second quarter of 2023, creating 10 fire departments and generating $200,000. 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 firefighting customers, projects $20 million in revenue.
HEN has competition, of course. IDEX Corp., a public company, sells hoses, nozzles, and monitors. Software companies like Central Square serve the fire department. A Miami company, First Due, which sells software to public safety agencies, disclosed as much $355 million round Last August. But neither company is “doing what it’s supposed to do,” Sethi said.
Still, Sethi says the hurdles aren’t unexpected — quite quickly. HEN serves the Marine Corps, US Army bases, Navy atomic labs, NASA, Abu Dhabi Civil Defense, and ships to 22 countries. It works over 120 distributors and recently qualified for GSA after a vetting process for a year (it is a federal seal of approval that makes it easier for the military and government agencies to buy).
The fire department buys approximately 20,000 new machines per year to replace old equipment in the national fleet of 200,000, so that if HEN is qualified, it becomes a recurring revenue (it’s an idea), and because the hardware generates data, the revenue continues between purchase cycles.
HEN’s dual purpose requires building a specific team. The software leader was formerly a senior director who helped build Adobe’s cloud infrastructure. Other members of HEN’s 50-person team include former NASA engineers and veterans from Tesla, Apple, and Microsoft. “If you ask me a technical question, I won’t be able to answer everything,” Sethi admitted with a laugh, “but I have a really good team which (is) a blessing.”
Indeed, it is the software that gives a hint where this becomes interesting, because when HEN is selling nozzles, it is amassing something more valuable: data. Highly specific, real world data about how water behaves under pressure, how flow rates interact with materials, how fire reacts to extinguishing techniques, how physics works in an active fire environment.
This is exactly what the world modeling company needs. These AI systems that build simulated representations of the physical environment to predict future states 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 would not elaborate, but he knew what he was sitting on. Companies that train robotics and predictive physics engines will pay handsomely for this real-world physics data.
Investors also noticed. last monthHEN closed a $20 million Series A round, plus a $2 million venture loan from Silicon Valley Bank. O’Neil Strategic Capital led the financing, with NSFO, Tanas Capital, and z21 Ventures participating. The round brings the company’s total funding to more than $30 million.
Meanwhile, Sethi was looking ahead. He said the company will return to fundraising in the second quarter of this year.