Sensors that smell the air to detect signs of fire

Enhance resilience through the detection and mitigation of wildfires and thus help humanity adapt to the realities of climate change. This is the mission of SLY, an Italian-American startup founded in February 2023 by Kseniya Lenarciak (photo), Max Lenarciak and Davide De Marchi. SLY offers organizations a monitoring system that allows them to quickly and accurately detect all fires and industrial gas leaks, thanks to sensor tracking of anomalous gases present in the air. Sensors, once positioned in a forest or risk area, provide early warning about the initial stages of a fire or gas leak, so that alerts are sent to users within minutes via the Treeage software platform.

SLY is based in Santa Caterina dello Ionio, near Catanzaro, and also has offices in Milan, Rome and San Francisco. Kseniya Lenarciak explains the choice of Calabria as location for her startup like this: “We had gone to visit relatives in Italy, but we got stuck there due to the Covid lockdown. In Calabria wildfires are a big problem. We also experienced a fire on our agricultural land. We set up SLY to address the issue.” In Italy they were able to tap into the world-class engineering talent. SLY and its engineers over the course of a year and a half have created a state-of-the-art, commercially-ready platform.

The SLY solution is sold in Italy, Europe, North America and is getting early traction in South America. “Our goal is to bring our technology to new markets as quickly as possible and make it scalable, also taking advantage of the fact that two of the co-founders come from Canada. Furthermore, wildfires are a global problem, not just an Italian one,” says Kseniya Lenarciak, CEO of SLY. Its major vertical being targeted is infrastructure operators such as electric utilities and gas pipelines. The downside of working with these large enterprises is that they are relatively slow decision makers. “But for us time is of the essence: the longer it takes to do something, the more money we burn. Building relationships also takes time, so our sales cycle is long,” remarks the CEO of SLY. Thanks to the versatility of the Treeage platform, the startup also deploys solutions for public and private landowners who have a shorter sales cycle: SLY sells to these channels via their existing service providers such as systems integrators.

To overcome the difficulty of a B2B business that needs to demonstrate proof of traction, SLY was able to count on the support of B4i (Bocconi for innovation) accelerator, which invested in SLY in April 2023. “B4i helped us with its extraordinary network, opening the doors to us of large Italian companies from from a commercial point of view with, to whom we were introduced and who then became customers. The incubator also provided us with commercial advice, invested in the startup and helped us close our first round of fundraising,” says Ms Lenarciak. The startup closed its first capital increase in December 2023, financed by B4i, Zero (CDP's cleantech accelerator), and the European Regional Development Fund for Calabria. “The capital raised has been critical for us to pay the salaries of our engineers,” she says. The startup is currently in capital raising mode again, because it needs to expand, create a sales network and continue to invest in its innovative technology.