A New Chapter for Frontline is Starting, Thanks for Your Early Support

To All Those in our Frontline Community, 

Frontline is entering a new chapter. Our early supporters have seen what we’ve now proven in the field: homes can survive wildfire when preparation, design, and technology are applied proactively. Yet, that proof was decades in the making. 

When I first started in wildfire management and landscape ecology 30 years ago, the concept of living with fire was a fringe message fondly used by the “tree hugger” community to indicate the importance of fire as a natural process in our ecosystem.  The message never really took hold, as budgets were spent on suppressing fire, modifying plant communities, and attempting to control the carbon cycle of nature.  In lieu of living with fire, a blank check “war-time” approach on suppressing nature was applied. Here we are nearly a century into that approach acknowledging its ineffectiveness in protecting against the wind-driven ember exposure that causes whole communities to burn.  

Pressure and time, pressure and time, pressure and time… like ocean waves crashing on a beach or a river carving out a valley, nature’s forces operate everywhere, all at once, and on timelines that are independent of economic and political cycles.  Fire regimes are part of nature’s long duration timeline, and restore plant communities from coast to coast in the United States.   As we have seen, it is simply a matter of time when the location of a wind driven fire overlaps with the location of a community; and just like other elements in nature such as wind, rain, and snow, we can assemble our homes and communities to live in harmony with the natural process of fire. 

What is evolving today is a paradigm shift in which the concept of living with fire is no longer fringe and hippie, but rather economically mainstream and increasingly a requirement of insurance and mortgage markets. The devastating fires in Los Angeles earlier this year made that undeniable. Roughly 16,000 structures were lost, yet homes protected by Frontline systems largely survived. Our 96% success rate is the result of careful design, tested technology, and a focus on avoiding fire ignition in the first place. It proves that living safely with wildfire is possible, even under extreme conditions.  

To further the mission and to scale Frontline, we recently closed a Series A round and partnered with Norwest, a Silicon Valley firm that has decades of experience backing innovative companies. This investment lets us make fire-resilient communities a reality across the country. It also enables us to enhance our systems based on what we’re learning and prepare for new challenges as wildfire conditions evolve.

This investment arrives at a moment of growing need for proactive solutions: risk is increasing, insurance options are limited, and climate change is transforming our landscapes and our economic markets. Frontline exists to give communities the tools to adapt and live safely with fire, rather than simply respond after it arrives.

Thank you for believing in our vision, for trusting our technology, and for being among the first to join this movement. We’re proving that living safely with wildfire is possible and that we can do it together.

We’re just getting started. 

Harry Statter

Founder & CEO, Frontline Wildfire Defense