In 2018, Vasia Tremsin, currently the COO of a company producing outdoor fire sensors, Burner sensorswas a high school senior when, on his way back from Lake Tahoe, he saw a familiar but disturbing sight: a “really big” fire in California. “I assumed to myself, Why does this keep happening over and once again?“Remembers Tremsin.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Torch Sensors. Vasya Tremsin, Co-Founder and COO.
Growing up in the state, Tremsin often saw large forest fires along the highway and in the news, but that day something dawned on him and after further research he realized that “the problem was actually much greater” than he had thought. Some experts estimate that forest fires are responsible for 20% of total greenhouse gas emissionsand a 2023 congressional report showed that they cost US economy worth a whole lot of billions of dollars a yr.
When Tremsin began researching the problem, “there was basically no technology” that might detect wildfires early enough to stop them before they got greater, he says. So Tremsin decided to work on an idea for a science fair project—and his invention won the best project award in its category at the International Science and Engineering Fair.
A judge at the trade show encouraged Tremsin to show his idea into a real product. “I was just a high school kid,” he says, “so I didn’t know how startups worked, financing, or how to build a company—because I was 18.” But one of the judges introduced Tremsin to Michael Buckwald, cofounder and then-CEO of Leap Motion, a hand-tracking sensor technology company. Buckwald co-founded Tremsin with his father, Anton Tremsin, and is now CEO of Torch Sensors.
“We quickly realized that at scale, this technology would be much more powerful.”
Tremsin says it took some time to build the first prototype of the sensor because that they had to make it “very robust” with reliable detection capabilities. To do that, they equipped the product with infrared and spectral evaluation cameras, in addition to gas, temperature and humidity sensors that work in tandem “to provide a reliable measurement” across multiple variables, Tremsin explains.
Image Source: Courtesy of Torch Sensors
“We quickly realized that at scale, this technology would be much more powerful,” Tremsin says. “The sensors could actually create this networked aspect and could cover and protect an entire area—an entire property or a community. We went from one sensor detecting a fire to building a network of sensors that covered the entire area.”
Additionally, Torch Sensors is using its data and other sources of wildfire data to assist deploy a “safety net.”
“We [went] to different types of fires all over California to test and calibrate the sensors ourselves,” Tremsin says. “After that, we were ready to demo to large customers. We’ve done a lot of demos over the last year and a half and we’ve had good feedback, especially on how far we can see the fire — we’ve been able to see a fire that’s only a few feet across a football field. Sometimes you couldn’t even see it with the naked eye, but our sensors were still able to see it from that far away.”
Image Source: Courtesy of Torch Sensors
The Torch Sensors product has attracted great interest among large enterprises and communities with significant assets that required protection.
“They still feel the pain and anxiety about fires that could hit them and destroy a lot of things they’ve built or own,” Tremsin explains. “So we’re alleviating that pain as much as we can with this comprehensive solution that includes deep technology equipment and all the data that we collect.”
We literally couldn’t scale up and down production as quickly as we would have liked to for the hundreds of acres of coverage we would have liked.”
High demand has proven to be a challenge from a supply chain perspective, Tremsin said.
“We literally couldn’t scale production as quickly as we needed to for the thousands of acres of coverage that we had demand for,” he explains, “which is a huge problem, but it also creates a lot of pressure. We had utilities, parks, government entities, private landowners asking us, ‘When can I have this product? When will it be ready? We really need it.’”
Fortunately, the company has found at least two suppliers for each key sensitive component to streamline the process because it progresses. Tremsin says the company is conducting its first batch of enterprise pilot tests this summer.
Image Source: Courtesy of Torch Sensors
Being a young entrepreneur wasn’t without its challenges, Tremsin admits, especially when it got here to building credibility and trust. “As a very young person, I had to prove that our technology did what we said it did,” he says. “Because it’s so new and hasn’t been done before, there’s a lot of skepticism at first about what our product could do.”
As Torch Sensors continues to prove its technology and scale, Tremsin is looking forward to expanding outside the U.S. and further researching and developing the product’s capabilities, whether that’s extending the range of the sensors, reducing their power consumption, or making them even higher at detecting. He hopes to develop some of those capabilities with government agencies to realize broader support and “help us all combat the problem of large-scale wildfires.”
“I had to become more open and willing to receive any feedback.”
Tremsin also has some advice for young entrepreneurs who want their big idea to have a real impact on the world.
“Be as flexible as possible and treat everything as a learning experience,” says Tremsin. “Step one is to destroy your ego and be willing to accept that your opinion and way of doing something may be wrong and that it would be best to change it. Everything, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable it is at the time, is a learning experience.” [that] will 100% be useful in the future. As I built Torch, I needed to turn into more open and willing to simply accept any feedback, whether it was from my customers, my co-founders, or even the individuals who work for me. And I gained an incredible knowledge base.”
This article is a part of our ongoing Young Entrepreneur® series, where we highlight the stories, challenges, and successes of being an entrepreneur. young business owner.