As California wildfire season nears, startup BurnBot is working on a high-tech approach to prevention
BurnBot RX burns unwanted vegetation without emitting plumes of smoke.
Lora Kolodny for CNBC
Last year’s record heat wave worsened drought and dry conditions across the globe, a particularly calamitous situation for California, which has seen 13 of the state’s 20 most destructive wildfires in history break out since 2017.
In South San Francisco, a small startup is working on a high-tech approach to wildfire prevention.
Anukool Lakhina and Waleed “Lee” Haddad founded BurnBot in 2022 to develop robotics and remote-controlled vehicles that can munch up and burn away invasive plants or other dry vegetation that can fuel fires if left fallow.
BurnBot has just raised a $20 million funding round led by climate-focused ReGen Ventures, for expansion, hiring, and to develop new machines that can traverse steeper hills and get into tighter spaces.
Before BurnBot, firefighters and land owners had to use expensive, time-consuming and more dangerous options like grazing away the vegetation (typically with goats), burning it, applying herbicides or removing vegetation mechanically with a mix of equipment and manual labor.
“The sort of traditional way to do a prescribed burn is with drip torches, and that requires a large number of people,” said Lakhina, BurnBot’s CEO. “A drip torch is like a diesel watering can. You go around, you drop diesel, then ignite it.”
Burnbot’s current model, the RX, is a remote-operated vehicle that looks a cross between an oversized Zamboni and a steel cooking range with a set of fire extinguishers strapped to its back. Like other agricultural and construction equipment, the RX rolls forward on tank-like tracks and wheels, which enable it to maneuver through rough fields.
Within the chambers of the RX are several rows of torches that emit blue flames, and adjust the heat levels precisely to zap away unwanted vegetation or other fuels on the ground below. The chambers of the BurnBot RX also trap and torch away the smoke that comes from burning vegetation, so it doesn’t pollute the air in surrounding communities. When the torching is done, the RX sprays water repeatedly to extinguish any remaining embers.
Inside the chambers of the BurnBot RX torches are lit to do the work of a prescribed burn.
Lora Kolodny for CNBC
Lakhina said BurnBot’s systems can be put to use where traditional controlled burns won’t work. For example, drip torch burns produce a good deal of smoke, which is conductive enough it would interfere with the proper functioning of power lines or high-voltage equipment. BurnBot’s machines can be used even under power lines.
The company is aiming to make every person who works in fire prevention 10 times more effective than they were with old methods, Lakhina said.
Haddad, BurnBot’s chief technology officer, noted that land isn’t always ready to “receive fire” in a prescribed burn. So the company has programmed equipment, which it procures from another supplier, to roll ahead of the RX to crunch up the vegetation in an area of concern before it’s ready for torching.
BurnBot plans to conduct a prescribed burn this Friday in San Diego, a project for CalTrans, the state’s transportation agency. It also plans for another burn for Pacific Gas & Electric, the state’s major utility, in June.
PG&E spends upward of $1 billion on “vegetation management” each year. Kevin Johnson, who leads the company’s Wildfire Resilience Partnerships, said PG&E is always “looking for opportunities to do this work safer, faster, cheaper and to be more environmentally friendly.”
BurnBot has already completed one demonstration of its controlled burn machine underneath PG&E transmission lines.
Brice Muenzer, a battalion chief with CalFire in Monterey, California, said massive fires in the state and throughout the U.S. over the past decade have been partly caused and certainly exacerbated by overzealous elimination of smaller fires, including ritual fires from indigenous communities.
“We removed fire from the ecosystem for the last 150 years and are living through that reality now,” the chief said.
CalFire has worked with BurnBot personnel, machines and additional drones overhead, to create what’s known as a control line in the field in at least one location. Muenzer says the group hopes to do more with the startup.
Creating a control line, or blacklining the land, involves firefighters strategically burning areas when the weather is calm and where flames can be controlled to create scars that will block other fires from jumping in and reaching areas with lots of new material to burn.
BurnBot cofounders (L-R) CTO Waleed “Lee” Haddad and CEO Anukool Lakhina
Lora Kolodny for CNBC
BurnBot aims to eventually expand its operations beyond California, with offices and fleets of its machines wherever vegetation management is needed and wildfire risk is highest.
“There are 50 million acres that the U.S. Forest Service has said need treatment every year and that’s just forest land,” said Lakhina. In the U.S. there are 237 million acres that need treatment overall. And grazing can cost $1,000 an acre.”
Childrens’ health is at stake along with property and healthy forests, Lakhina added. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, wildfire smoke can be more toxic than air pollution from other sources, leading to more emergency room visits, especially for children who are exposed.
Because BurnBot offers greater precision than grazing, herbicides and mechanical removal, its systems should prove ecologically more beneficial as well, Haddad said. The BurnBot RX is able to help prevent the spread of seeds from invasive species, for example, without causing any of those species to develop resistance to an herbicide.
ReGen was joined in BurnBot’s funding round by investors including AmFam Ventures, which is the venture arm of an insurance company, Toyota Ventures, and earlier backers including robotics fund Pathbreaker, Convective Capital and Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital.
WATCH: Revisiting Maui six months after devastating wildfires
Samuel Boivin | Nurphoto | Getty Images
TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew told employees on Thursday that the company’s U.S. operations will be housed in a new joint venture.
The entity is named TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC, according to a memo sent by Chew and obtained by CNBC. As part of the joint venture, Chew said the company has signed agreements with the three managing investors: Oracle, Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. He said that the deal’s “closing date” is Jan. 22.
Under a national security law, which the Supreme Court upheld in January, China-based ByteDance was required to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations or face an effective ban in the country. In September, President Donald Trump signed an executive order approving a proposed deal that would keep TikTok operational in the U.S. by meeting the requirements of a law originally signed by former President Joe Biden.
Chew noted that the new TikTok joint venture would be “majority owned by American investors, governed by a new seven-member majority-American board of directors, and subject to terms that protect Americans’ data and U.S. national security.”
The U.S. joint venture will be 50% held by a consortium of new investors, including Oracle, Silver Lake and MGX with 15% each. Just over 30% will be held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance, and 19.9% will be retained by ByteDance, the memo said.
The TikTok chief said the entity will be responsible for protecting U.S. data, ensuring the security of its prized algorithm, content moderation and “software assurance.” He added that the joint venture will “have the exclusive right and authority to provide assurances that content, software, and data for American users is secure.”
In addition to being an investor, Oracle will serve as the “trusted security partner” in charge of auditing and validating that it complies with “agreed upon National Security Terms,” the memo said. Sensitive U.S. data will be stored in Oracle’s U.S.-based cloud computing data centers, Chew wrote.
The new TikTok entity will also be tasked with retraining the video app’s core content recommendation algorithm “on U.S. user data to ensure the content feed is free from outside manipulation,” the memo said.
Chew noted that TikTok global U.S. entities “will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.”
Under Trump’s executive order in September, the attorney general was blocked from enforcing the national security law for a 120-day period in order to “permit the contemplated divestiture to be completed,” allowing the deal to finalize by Jan 23.
WATCH: TikTok signs deal for sale of U.S. unit to joint venture
The VC arms of Google and Nvidia have invested in Swedish vibe coding startup Lovable’s $330 million Series B at a $6.6 billion valuation, the company announced on Thursday.
The news confirms an earlier story from CNBC, which reported on Tuesday that Lovable had raised at that valuation, trebling its valuation from its previous round in July, and that the investors included U.S. VC firms Accel and Khosla Ventures.
CapitalG, one of Google’s VC divisions, and Menlo Ventures led the round. Alongside Accel and Khosla, Nvidia venture arm NVentures, actor Gwyneth Paltrow’s VC firm Kinship Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Atlassian Ventures, T.Capital, Hubspot Ventures, DST Global, EQT Global, Creandum and Evantic also participated.
The fresh funds take Lovable’s total raised in 2025 to over $500 million.
“Lovable has done something rare: built a product that enterprises and founders both love,” said Laela Sturdy, managing partner at CapitalG in a statement accompanying the announcement.
“The demand we’re seeing from Fortune 500 companies signals a fundamental shift in how software gets built.”
Lovable’s platform uses AI models from providers like OpenAI and Anthropic to help users build apps and websites using text prompts, without technical knowledge of coding.
The startup reported $200 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in November, just under a year after achieving $1 million in ARR for the first time. It was founded in 2023 by Anton Osika and Fabian Hedin.
Vibe coding startups have seen big interest from VCs in recent times, as investors bet on their promise of drastically reducing the time it takes to create software and apps.
In the U.S., Anysphere, which created coding tool Cursor, raised $2.3 billion at a $29.3 billion valuation in November. In September, Replit hit a $3 billion price tag after picking up $250 million and Vercel closed a $300 million round at a $9.3 billion valuation.
The Micron logo is seen displayed at the 8th China International Import Expo.
Sheldon Cooper | Lightrocket | Getty Images
Micron Technology‘s stock jumped 15% after the company signaled robust demand for its memory chips and blew away fiscal first-quarter estimates.
During an earnings call with analysts, Micron, which makes memory storage used for computers and artificial intelligence servers, said data center needs have fueled greater demand for its products.
Micron said it expects the total addressable market for high-bandwidth memory to hit $100 billion by 2028, growing at a 40% compounded annual growth rate. Management also upped its capital expenditures guidance to $20 billion from $18 billion.
“We are more than sold out,” said business chief Sumit Sadana. “We have a significant amount of unmet demand in our models and this is just consistent with an environment where the demand is substantially higher than supply for the foreseeable future.
Micron topped Wall Street estimates for the fiscal first quarter and issued blowout guidance.
The company reported adjusted earnings of $4.78 per share on $13.64 billion in revenue, surpassing LSEG estimates for earnings of $3.95 per share and $12.84 billion in sales.
Revenues in the current quarter are expected to hit about $18.70 billion, blowing past the $14.20 billion expected by LSEG. Adjusted earnings are forecast to reach $8.42, versus expectations of $4.78 per share.
JPMorgan upped its price target on the stock following the results, citing the favorable pricing setup, while Bank of America upgraded shares to a buy rating.
Morgan Stanley called the results the best revenue and net income upside in the “history of the U.S. semis industry” outside of Nvidia.
“If AI keeps growing as we expect, we believe that the next 12 months are going to have broader coat tails to the AI trade than just the processor names and memory would be the biggest beneficiary,” analysts wrote.
WATCH: Micron shares spike on better-than-expected quarterly results
Micron year-to-date stock chart.
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