Singapore gave me two very different reminders of why I am doing this work.
One was at AT ONE IMPACT WEEK 2026, among people discussing capital, institutions and systems change. The other was on Canning Walk, in the same hotel building where I had sat with a coffee two years earlier, watching Greek wildfire news on television.
Those two moments are more connected than they first appear.
At the World Economic Forum roundtable, A Catalytic Challenge: Financing Resilience Before the Fire, we talked about an issue that keeps coming back: prevention is still hard to fund.
The case for prevention is straightforward. Detect fires earlier. Protect forests, people and infrastructure. Avoid losses before they become visible on a balance sheet.
But this is exactly the problem. A burned landscape has a price. An insurance claim has a price. A destroyed asset has a price. The value of a fire that never becomes a disaster is harder to count, explain and finance.
That is why catalytic capital matters. It can take the early risk that conventional capital usually avoids. It can help prove that a solution works in real operating conditions, then give insurers, public agencies, forest owners and infrastructure operators a clearer basis for investment.
I shared three examples from Robotics Cats and our partners.
The first is AURA Foresight. Robotics Cats is part of this international XPRIZE Wildfire finalist team with Fire Foresight, Taz Drone Solutions, Little Place Labs and the University of Bristol. The challenge is to autonomously detect, reach and fully suppress a high-risk fire within 10 minutes across a 1,000 km² area, while avoiding decoy fires. Bringing organisations from Hong Kong, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom into one team is not easy. Challenge-based funding helped make that collaboration possible.
In Thailand, we worked with Fire Foresight and a telecom partner on an early wildfire-detection pilot near national parks. The system detected wildfire outbreaks during both daytime and nighttime operations. The pilot performed well, and we expect the project to move into production-scale deployment in 2027.
Then there is Greece. On 6 September 2026, our camera network detected a vegetation fire in Drosopigi, Afidna, and issued alerts at 10:14 a.m. local time. The first public report we identified appeared 16 minutes later. Sixteen minutes does not solve every problem in a wildfire response. But it can give responders a better starting point. In this work, that can matter.
After the At One Impact Week event, I went back to METT Singapore, formerly Hotel Fort Canning. In August 2024, I stayed there for the Biodiversity Accelerator+ kick-off week.
That programme gave me useful advice, but more importantly, it gave me people. I met founders, experts and advisors who have remained part of the journey. Steve O’Connor, Christina Lee and Baxter Hernandez are among them.
One morning in 2024, I watched news coverage of wildfires in Greece from the hotel bar. That year proved to be an exceptionally challenging fire season for Greece.
I remember feeling frustrated. Fires kept happening. People were still reacting after the fact. I took a photo of the screen and made a private promise: keep learning, keep building and find a way to contribute.
I did not know then whether we would be able to deploy a working wildfire-detection network in Greece. It took years of discussions, technical work, setbacks and partnerships. Today, we have a system operating in the Athens area, supporting earlier situational awareness for local fire-response operations.
I do not think technology alone will fix wildfire risk. It will not. Good technology still needs trusted local partners, real operations, patient funding and people willing to stay with difficult projects longer than is comfortable.
That is what I took away from Singapore.
The work is moving. Slowly at times. But it is moving.
Robotics Cats is open to conversations with insurers, philanthropies, forest owners, infrastructure operators and public agencies that want to put practical wildfire-resilience solutions into the field.
