Israeli startup FireDome uses missile defense tech to combat wildfires

The Israeli startup company FireDome has developed a system to combat wildfires that is based on missile defense technologies. The brand-new company was established in 2024 by the CEO Gadi Benjamini and Dr. Adi Naor Pomerantz.

FireDome’s system, inspired by Israel’s renowned Iron Dome aerial defense, integrates advanced defense strategies with artificial intelligence.

As Los Angeles is battling extensive wildfires, Benjamini who is an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military veteran, explained the similarities between warfare and fighting wildfires.

“Similar to a war, to fight wildfires there are the firefighters, which are the infantry. There are airplanes, but darkness makes it harder to fly during the night and also during strong winds, and what we develop is a kind of artillery support,” Benjamini said in an interview with The Times of Israel.

“The biggest challenge in the climate tech area are wildfires, and more specifically, the reaction to wildfires, because many companies focus on detection,” he added.

Benjamini emphasized the unique features of his company.

“What we develop is a system to enhance firefighters’ abilities and capabilities to address more fires simultaneously, like spot fires and ember, and to reach places where sometimes they [the firefighters] can’t, due to different logistics constraints that they have,” he argued.

Benjamini explained that FireDome’s system, inspired by Israel’s renowned Iron Dome aerial defense, integrates advanced defense strategies with artificial intelligence. The autonomous system is designed to detect and suppress wildfires and offers two defensive layers.

“The smart capsules contain sensors that allow us to program the specific location in which they open up, disperse the material in the air above the ground, and create a kind of dome protection around the property or asset, so if a fire approaches, it will block it, and we have the second layer to identify and react to spot fires that are ignited by drifting embers,” he said.  “Eventually, the property remains intact and without any damage, similar to how the Iron Dome protects a city or neighborhoods by intercepting missiles before they arrive,” he continued.

FireDome’s ambition is to deploy its first test system in Israel in May, focusing on wooded areas such as the forests in and around Jerusalem and the Carmel Forest close to the northern Israeli city of Haifa. If things go according to plan, FireDome intends to test its system in the United States in 2026, focusing on the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas.

Benjamini believes it is too early to draw any conclusions from the current lethal wildfires in Los Angeles County. However, he argues that once it is operational, FireDome’s system offers advantages for future fighting against wildfires.

“We can handle strong winds and we can handle spot fires, which are the main advantages of our solution,” he assessed. “Putting out a fire at the interface between the wild land where the fire started and the neighborhood could have made a major difference, because we could have created barriers to protect these neighborhoods and we could have fought the spot fires that started there,” he continued.

Benjamini concluded by stressing that developing wildfire fighting capabilities is a work in progress that constantly needs to be improved based on experiences.

“But we have to do more research and study what happened, and then we will also publish main insights and conclusions that we can take to our solution to better design the product to be able to help with these types of wildfires.”

Israel, which has a warm and dry climate that is similar to southern California, is no stranger to wildfires. In Aug. 2021, Israeli firefighters struggled for several days to contain a massive forest wildfire in the Judean Hills close to Israel’s capital Jerusalem.