This Israeli Innovation ‘Hears’ Flames Before Anyone Sees Them!

In today’s world, innovation is continually finding new ways to make a positive impact. Around the world, technology is helping address major challenges, protecting both people and the planet when natural disasters strike.

Introducing Firewave, a new AI-powered early wildfire detection system that can “listen to” and spot wildfires within minutes using acoustic sensors, and emit urgent alerts. It strives to avoid the suffering and destruction that these giant blazes cause, as The Jerusalem Post reports. 

As Firewave co-founder, Dr. Jenia Yurkiovsky, tells the paper: “The main bottleneck with wildfires is in detection, with rescue services not being able to detect the fires before they become a major problem.” Today, the strapline of Firewave is “Listening to Nature to Protect It.”

This innovation is likely to interest multiple countries, as climate change is leading to more extreme weather including higher temperatures that can trigger wildfires, as the BBC details.

A Family Vacation Sparks a Lightbulb Moment
Significantly, the eureka moment for Firewave didn’t take place in a lab, but when Firewave’s Yurkovsky was vacationing in Greece, i24NEWS reports. As his family headed back to Israel, a huge wildfire broke out on the island of Evia. 

Seeing the scenes of 30,000 people being forced to flee the island prompted Yurkovsky to look for a solution: “I started to think that, okay, there must be a better way to know about wildfires coming,” he told the channel.

This thinking sent him off on a review of existing technologies, which he found flawed. Satellites, for instance, are designed for monitoring fires that are already burning, not for catching small ones. Cameras flourish in open, flat terrain, but are less effective in dense forest where smoke and heat aren’t in the line of sight, leading to hazardous delays. Gas sensors that “smell smoke” still need to be densely deployed, and use up precious time awaiting accumulated smoke for detection from a distance.

He joined forces with his friend Eduard Grinberg, and fellow former physics student at Tel Aviv University, now Firewave’s co-founder and CTO. The duo arrived at an interesting insight. “We can hear the fire, right? We can see the fire, smell and hear, “ Yurkovsky tells the channel, “so why not try to hear it?”

For the next year, while still holding down their day jobs, the intrepid physicists spent evenings and weekends building a prototype, before approaching investors, and being accepted into the Techstars accelerator. Today, Firewave has raised over a  million dollars, with further investment imminent.

How Does Firewave’s Sensor Work?
Each of Firewave’s solar-powered sensors in use is discreetly mounted on a tree, four to five metres (13-16 feet) up, and monitors an area of 2.5 acres (119,000 square feet) presently. They are installed near vulnerable areas such as national parks, or critical infrastructure. They come with microphones, and humidity and temperature sensors. 

These sensors only send an alert when an actual fire is detected by software sensitive to wildfire-related sounds. Larger fires get picked up at greater distances too, while neighboring sensors, responding to the same blaze, show exactly how an uncontained fire is spreading.

According to Yurkovsky, their sensors can detect a fire of about one square meter (11 square feet) in two to three minutes. The Jerusalem Post reports that the company uses AI to distinguish an area’s normal sounds from those of a fire, or what CTECH by Calcalist calls “the unique sound signatures of combustion.”

This technological wizardry can pinpoint if a fire breaking out is a controlled fire, or a wildfire triggered by a heatwave. Sensors can also be set to ignore environmental sounds such as cicadas in California.

Connected to an app, once a sensor identifies a blaze, it sends an instant alert with the coordinates of the devices detecting the fire. “We have a dashboard,” Yurkovsky explains to i24NEWS. “On the map you see each sensor as a dot. And if there is a fire, the sensor will turn red — you see the exact location. You can tap and it shows you the quickest road to reach the place and suppress the fire before it spreads.” 

Pushing Back Against Climate Change
In addition to the wildfire on the island of Evia in Greece, Yurkovsky’s was moved to research solutions by the catastrophic wildfire in the Carmel Forest in northern Israel back in 2010. 45 people lost their lives in the tragedy, while he estimates that around a million trees were damaged. More recently, two 2025 wildfires in the Jerusalem Hills decimated an estimated 6425 acres (11 square kilometers) according to an article in The Jerusalem Post. 

During the Carmel Forest wildfire, the fire crews noticed that water was evaporating even before it reached the flames. Yurkovsky emphasizes that this isn’t an isolated case, with the culprit being global warming “We see this pattern all over the world recently — because of climate change, the dryness of the surface, we see fires becoming more and more unstoppable,” he tells i24NEWS.

Israel is a country in real need of Firewave’s early wildfire detection. As YNet Global details, its hot climate, dry vegetation, strong wind and difficult terrain, as well as the fact that in many areas forests and communities are in close proximity, make many areas vulnerable to wildfires. At the same time, the country’s short distances can work in its favor as crews can respond fast after early fire detection.

Today, Firewave has 50 sensors located throughout Israel, with hundreds planned for the US and Canada. The newest models use satellite communication for areas without cellular coverage. The product is aimed at forestry management bodies, national park authorities, critical infrastructure operators, rural communities, summer camps bordering dense vegetation, and even private landowners in high-risk areas. 

Yurkovsky remains optimistic that Firewave will help contain wildfires, telling i24NEWS that “The goal is to turn the race against wildfires into one humans can actually win — by hearing the fire before anyone can see it.”