The $11 million XPRIZE Wildfire competition, launched in 2023, brought together more than 300 innovators to tackle two urgent questions: can we spot a wildfire from space within ten minutes, and can a swarm of machines suppress a nascent blaze in the remote Alaskan wilderness before it spreads? While no team secured either grand prize, the finals revealed a suite of promising tools that could soon augment the work of firefighters worldwide.
Space-based fire spotting: AI-driven satellite intelligence
In the first track, entrants were asked to detect every fire igniting over a large swath of Australia within 10 minutes. Forty-five qualified submissions leveraged existing Earth-observation constellations, but the winning approaches relied on sophisticated artificial-intelligence pipelines that fuse optical and radar data. The UK-based SIRIUS Wildfire Alliance claimed first place, earning $500,000 for a system that not only flags a fire instantly but also models its likely spread using a blend of satellite imagery.
Second-place went to Team Snuffed of Arizona, which received $250,000 for a “transparent, auditable and uncertainty-aware” detection framework that emphasizes usability for on-ground crews. Additional recognitions of $100,000 each were awarded to MyRadar (commercial readiness), DeepFire (operational alert capability) and Mayday.AI (adapting volcanic-ash algorithms to see smoke through clouds).
The competition’s field test took place at the New South Wales Rural Fire Service in April 2026. Although none of the teams met the exact criteria for the $3.5 million Minderoo Foundation grand prize, the exercise highlighted the growing relevance of dedicated wildfire satellites such as Germany’s OroraTech constellation (debuted March 2025) and the Google-backed FireSat microsatellites (first launch July 2026). As Andrea Santy, program director of XPRIZE Wildfire, explained, “Current satellites are not built for wildfire detection—they’re built for a lot of other environmental monitoring and weather monitoring.”
Autonomous response in Alaska: drones take the heat
The second track pushed teams to locate and suppress a high-risk fire in the Nenana region of Alaska—an area roughly the size of the San Francisco Bay Area—within the same ten-minute window. Finalists deployed a mix of ground-based gas sensors, thermal cameras and autonomous aircraft to locate the ignition source and then launch firefighting drones.
U.S. defense contractor Anduril Industries emerged as the top performer, earning $1.2 million for a solution that couples a “Sentry Tower” of thermal imagers with AI-driven computer vision, followed by a swarm of reconnaissance drones and a Ghost-X drone that drops fire-retardant balls. Lockheed Martin added a $1 million bonus for delivering the fastest detection time.
Germany’s Dryad Networks captured second place with $800,000 for a network of 170 solar-powered ground sensors that sniff out combustion gases, then task an observation drone to pinpoint the hotspot before a Silvaguard suppression drone attacks. The third-place prize of $500,000 went to the UK-Australia partnership AURA Foresight which assembled off-the-shelf DJI drones and AI software in a “Home Depot” approach to achieve rapid response despite only weeks of preparation.
All three finalists succeeded in detecting the fire under ten minutes, but none could fully extinguish it, which is why the $3.5 million grand prize for this track also remained unclaimed.
Why the competition matters amid mounting wildfire costs
The urgency of faster detection and response is underscored by recent disasters: the Lahaina fire in Hawaii (), the record-breaking California blaze that razed nearly 12,000 homes in January 2025 and cost an estimated $140 billion, and the massive smoke plumes that blanketed large parts of North America and Europe in the past three years. As Santy noted, “We know that wildfires are becoming more intense, more frequent. They’re even happening in places where it’s not a natural part of the landscape, like in the Amazon or up in tundra regions.”
Future XPRIZE plans may include a follow-up contest focused exclusively on scaling these prototypes for real-world deployment. In the meantime, the organizers are working with fire agencies to transition the most promising tools—especially those that can detect a blaze before the typical 15-minute lag of a 911 call—into operational assets.
