As Christmas has arrived and the year is coming to an end, the CAURUS Technologies team would like to take the opportunity to say thank you to all of our partners, suppliers, supporting organizations, friends and family. Thank you for your contributions, energy, insights, ideas and unwavering support for our mission to digitize water usage and work for breakthroughs in forest firefighting.
2024 has been an eventful year which “moved the needle” for CAURUS Technologies in many ways: We’ve come closer to realizing our idea of digitizing water and improving its deployment, thus multiplying efficiency in the fight against wildfires.
We have completed the development of our sensor prototype and were able to complete multiple helicopter demonstration flights, together with our partners and customers during disaster relief training scenarios. This has generated realtime images and data, which allowed us to discuss outcomes, validate the data structure and further calibrate the software priorities according to the needs of the end users. Next, we will be working on data evaluation, preparing algorithm-based measurements and our analytics layers.
We are also proud to have now sold two sensor units and we see growing interest in our technology. For those who are interested in a demonstration of the sensor during flight, please contact us via our website’s product page.
As part of our Fraunhofer AHEAD journey (Phase 2), we also made good progress with tests of the dispersion extinguishing technology. While still in development, we were able to prove the potential of aerosol dispersion extinguishing: achieving a multiplying factor in extinguishing effect over conventional methods is possible! Our development project even made it into the scientific journal “Forschung Kompakt” by Fraunhofer in October 2024. https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-news/2024/october-2024/fighting-forest-fires-more-efficiently-from-the-air.html.
Next steps are the scaling of the dispersion effect on fires, finetuning of the opening mechanism and the selection of 2025 test components.
We’ve continued to beat the events track to meet potential partners, investors and customers. Most notably among our events were Start Summit in St. Gallen in February, the Future Forest Initiative (FFI) Forum in September and the Fraunhofer Investment Forum in München in October. For the FFI, we shared our solution with groups of forest owners and forest protection organisations, broadening our perspective on wildfires with their input.
And finally, we evolved as an organization by adding four new members to our core team: Martin Schmid joined us as Senior Consultant, working together with our existing expert advisors on the thermodynamic and practical user aspects of the sensor and the dispersion technology. Martin is also a member of @fire and thus brings in his expertise in civil protection and firefighting. Annette Wiedenbach supports all matters related to communications and public relations. And finally, working students Jasmin Hobbold and Prithvi Simha are delving into regulatory aspects for future certification of our technology parts and develop mathematical models for aero- and fluid dynamics for our software.
Last but not least, we’ve moved into our new office at the TUM Venture Lab Aerospace in Ottobrunn near Munich.
None of it would have been possible without the support of many. So let us wish all of you a very Merry Christmas, a joyful holiday season and a good start into 2025!