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
Elon Musk, chief executive officer of Tesla Inc., during a meeting between US President Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, not pictured, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, May 21, 2025.
Jim Lo Scalzo | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Tesla shares have dropped 7% from Friday’s closing price of $323.63 to the $300.71 close on Tuesday ahead of the company’s second-quarter deliveries report.
Wall Street analysts are expecting Tesla to report deliveries of around 387,000 — a 13% decline compared to deliveries of nearly 444,000 a year ago, according to a consensus compiled by FactSet. Prediction market Kalshi told CNBC on Tuesday that its traders forecast deliveries of around 364,000.
Shares in the electric vehicle maker had been rising after Tesla started a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in late June and CEO Elon Musk boasted of its first “driverless delivery” of a car to a customer there.
The stock price took a turn after Musk on Saturday reignited a feud with President Donald Trump over the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the massive spending bill that the commander-in-chief endorsed. The bill is now heading for a final vote in the House.
That legislation would benefit higher-income households in the U.S. while slashing spending on programs such as Medicaid and food assistance.
Musk did not object to cuts to those specific programs. However, Musk on X said the bill would worsen the U.S. deficit and raise the debt ceiling. The bill includes tax cuts that would add around $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, according to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office.
The Tesla CEO has also criticized aspects of the bill that would cut hundreds of billions of dollars in support for renewable energy development in the U.S. and phase out tax credits for electric vehicles.
Such changes could hurt Tesla as they are expected to lower EV sales by roughly 100,000 vehicles per year by 2035, according to think tank Energy Innovation.
The bill is also expected to reduce renewable energy development by more than 350 cumulative gigawatts in that same time period, according to Energy Innovation. That could pressure Tesla’s Energy division, which sells solar and battery energy storage systems to utilities and other clean energy project developers.
Trump told reporters at the White House on Tuesday that Musk was, “upset that he’s losing his EV mandate,” but that the tech CEO could “lose a lot more than that.” Trump was alluding to the subsidies, incentives and contracts that Musk’s many businesses have relied on.
SpaceX has received over $22 billion from work with the federal government since 2008, according to FedScout, which does federal spending and government contract research. That includes contracts from NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, among others.
Tesla has reported $11.8 billion in sales of “automotive regulatory credits,” or environmental credits, since 2015, according to an evaluation of the EV maker’s financial filings by Geoff Orazem, CEO of FedScout.
These incentives are largely derived from federal and state regulations in the U.S. that require automakers to sell some number of low-emission vehicles or buy credits from companies like Tesla, which often have an excess.
Regulatory credit sales go straight to Tesla’s bottom line. Credit revenue amounted to approximately 60% of Tesla’s net income in the second quarter of 2024.
WATCH: Threats to SpaceX & Tesla as Musk, Trump feud heats up
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos leaves Aman Venice hotel, on the second day of the wedding festivities of Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez, in Venice, Italy, June 27, 2025.
Yara Nardi | Reuters
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unloaded more than 3.3 million shares of his company in a sale valued at roughly $736.7 million, according to a financial filing on Tuesday.
The stock sale is part of a previously arranged trading plan adopted by Bezos in March. Under that arrangement, Bezos plans to sell up to 25 million shares of Amazon over a period ending May 29, 2026.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains chairman, has been selling stock in the company at a regular clip in recent years, though he’s still the largest individual shareholder. He adopted a similar trading plan in February 2024 to sell up to 50 million shares of Amazon stock through late January of this year.
Bezos previously said he’d sell about $1 billion in Amazon stock each year to fund his space exploration company, Blue Origin. He’s also donated shares to Day 1 Academies, his nonprofit that’s building a chain of Montessori-inspired preschools across several states.
The most recent stock sale comes after Bezos and Lauren Sanchez tied the knot last week in a lavish wedding in Venice. The star-studded celebration, which took place over three days and sparked protests from some local residents, was estimated to cost around $50 million.
Bezos is ranked third in Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index with a net worth of about $240 billion. He’s behind Tesla CEO Elon Musk at $363 billion and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg at $260 billion.
WATCH: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ wedding sparks Venice protests
Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California on May 20, 2025.
Camille Cohen | AFP | Getty Images
The Google Doodle is Alphabet’s most valuable piece of real estate, and on Tuesday, the company used that space to promote “AI Mode,” its latest AI search product.
Google’s Chrome browser landing pages and Google’s home page featured an animated image that, when clicked, leads users to AI Mode, the company’s latest search product. The doodle image also includes a share button.
The promotion of AI Mode on the Google Doodle comes as the tech company makes efforts to expose more users to its latest AI features amid pressure from artificial intelligence startups. That includes OpenAI which makes ChatGPT, Anthropic which makes Claude and Perplexity AI, which bills itself as an “AI-powered answer engine.”
Google’s “Doodle” Tuesday directed users to its search chatbot-like experience “AI Mode”
AI Mode is Google’s chatbot-like experience for complex user questions. The company began displaying AI Mode alongside its search results page in March.
“Search whatever’s on your mind and get AI-powered responses,” the product description reads when clicked from the home page.
AI Mode is powered by Google’s flagship AI model Gemini, and the tool has rolled out to more U.S. users since its launch. Users can ask AI Mode questions using text, voice or images. Google says AI Mode makes it easier to find answers to complex questions that might have previously required multiple searches.
In May, Google tested the AI Mode feature directly beneath the Google search bar, replacing the “I’m Feeling Lucky” widget — a place where Google rarely makes changes.
WATCH: Google buyouts highlight tech’s cost-cutting amid AI CapEx boom
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