Dryad

Dryad provides ultra-early fire detection systems of wildfires as well as health and growth monitoring solutions for public and private forests.

• Current status: Beta testing completed, manufacturing and POC testing underway.
• $4m of seed and grant funding raised from the EU, STIHL (the world's leading chainsaw manufacturer which intends to license the technology), LEAG (a German electricity company), the largest forest owner in Germany and a German impact investor.
• Experienced management team led by Telecom technology entrepreneur Carsten Brinkschulte with successful exits to Twilio and Blackberry.

• Customers include Forest owners, governments and utility companies which Dryad will target directly and through OEM agreements with partners such as STIHL.

Wildfires are a key driver to climate change, contributing up to 20% of global CO2 emissions, destroying the world's largest carbon sink with a devastating impact on biodiversity. At the same time, wildfires cause up to $140bn financial damage globally including direct cost for fire fighting, loss of property and business as well as $40bn insurance payouts. As more than 80% of wildfires are human-induced, Dryad’s mission is to protect the forest with a large-scale network of solar-powered gas-sensors, detecting wildfires within 60 minutes from ignition, enabling firefighters to extinguish fires before they spread out of control.

• Dryad has developed a unique early-warning system which can detect wildfires within 25 minutes of a fire starting which is a game-changer compared to the existing solutions based on cameras or satellite which often detect fires when it's too late.
• Dryad's technology enable forest owners to deploy a cost-effective IoT mesh network to connect the forest with solar-powered sensors to a cloud-based monitoring platform (one $20 sensor is needed for every 0.7ha of forest). The network can also be used for growth monitoring and emergency communications.

The mainstream technical alternative to Dryad Silvanet is to do nothing, leaving the forest unprotect fr om wildfires, resulting in annual CO2 emissions of 7.8bn tons of CO2. Technical alternatives to Dryad's Silvanet are optical systems detecting wildfires using high-resolution cameras mounted on a tower, typically overseeing an area of 10-20km in radius each. The cameras are rotating and cover a 360 degree view in 20 minutes, transmitting the high-resolution images to a central system wh ere an optical image processing aims to automatically identify the smoke plumes arising above the tree canopy in case of a wildfire.
As an example, in the state of Brandenburg, Germany, which has 1.1m hectares of forest, a system comprising 71 towers has been in operation for more than 7 years with a reported total cost of more than €20m to date. This solution has been deployed in several states in Germany with an estimated market share of more than 80%.

Most solutions aiming to detect wildfires are based on optical systems using cameras or satellites. However, optical solutions, hindered by tree canopy or clouds, can take hours to detect wildfires. Dryad’s Silvanet is focused on ultra-early detection of wildfires using solar-powered gas sensors placed in the forest, detecting wildfires within 60 minutes using built-in machine-learning (ML), analyzing the gas patterns to reliably detect a fire. As the system cannot rely on mobile network coverage in the forest, Silvanet provides a long-range wireless network (LoRa) which has been extended with a patent-pending mesh network architecture to cover very large areas. Built as a general-purpose IoT network infrastructure, the Silvanet can be used by any LoRa compliant 3rd party sensor, opening to health and growth-monitoring applications such as soil-moisture, sap-flow or tree-growth monitoring, feeding valuable data into the central Silvanet Cloud Platform, providing data analytics and alerting services to Dryad’s customers.

Silvanet consists of many sensors that are connected to a network of gateways. The total cost to deliver/install 1 sensor is c.€50, of which c.€30 is our hardware cost, c.€15 is installation costs and the remaining €5 represents our hardware margin. The total costs to deliver/install 1 gateway is c.€155, of which c.€120 is our hardware cost, c.€15 is installation costs (same as for sensors) and the remaining c.€20 represent our hardware margin. Total
sales for a Silvanet installation depend on the area deployed. Each sensor covers an area of c.1.3 ha and in order to establish the communication network with Dryad Silvanet gateways, we need to install 1 gateway for every 100 sensors. Each solution needs to have at least 1 gateway. We have are currently negotiating with a financing provider that would allow us to offer both a capex model and an opex model, as we could offer customers to lease the
solution from us over a set amount of time.

The installation of Dryad Silvanet is part of the solution that is sold to our customers. Majority of the one-off costs are hardware costs with a fraction of the costs relating to the installation. Our solution is easily mounted in trees or otherwise elevated positions (like electricity masts). Since the system is powered by solar energy, we do not require any additional connectivity/ power supply. While our business plan assumes that forest owners will purchase our equipment, we are in discussion with financing companies, that would allow us to cover the upfront cost and then amortise those costs over time via a recurring revenue/ leasing model.

As a small company aiming to address a large (global) market, Dryad aims to establish an indirect go-to-market strategy where the company will license its products on a white-label basis to international Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) which will sell and service the licensed products to customers in the regions they cover. Using OEMs, Dryad aims to scale globally while limiting its own operational expenses, allowing it to scale the business model, even with limited financial resources. Data storage of the Silvanet Cloud is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) which allows for local distribution and global scalability of the solution.

Continued product development (adding a contact-less fuel moisture sensor to determine the fire risk level), ongoing product development and improvement of existing product. Marketing, sales & support growing the sales team (adding pre- and post-sales support), hiring a marketing & PR manager to raise awareness for the solution. Go-to-market strategy building an OEM channel for the product to be sold internationally with local partners to support the product.

During the seed-round (September 2020) Dryad was valued at €5m post-money, based on a successful development of an MVP, market potential and strong founders team. Now, Dryad has productized the solution and verified in POC deployments and would expect a valuation that reflects the substantial reduction in risk (product development risk removed). Exact figures regarding valuation should be discussed at the shareholder level.

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Awards / Recognitions:
• Dryad featured in TOP 10 GreenTech or CleanTech Startups to Watch in 2021 by GlobalTech Outlook
• Silvanet awarded Solar Impulse Efficient Solution Label
• Dryad featured in Sifted's Sustain 100 watchlist
• Gartner names Dryad a Cool Vendor in IoT Thingification

Silvanet is built on a patent-pending mesh network architecture providing a communications infrastructure for IOT applications in the forest. Dryad has filed 4 PCT patent applications aiming to protect the key innovation, enabling large-scale LoRaWAN network deployments in the forest without requiring access to the grid and in areas without mobile network coverage.