Franco Rodríguez Viau was 16 years old when friends and family lost their homes to forest fires in Argentina. It was 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, and that curious teenager interested in social causes decided to do something about it.
What began as a high school curricular project transformed into Satellites on Fire, a startup that today processes more than 10 satellites every 10 minutes with its own artificial intelligence models. “We wanted to solve a real problem,” says Franco with the naturalness of someone who never thought that age was an impediment.
Currently, he has a team of 26 people and after closing a US$2.7 million investment round led by Dalus Capital, Franco reflects on a path that he never imagined when he spent these first four months developing a solution. “If you asked me a few months ago I would tell you that perhaps it would have been impossible to raise a round,” he admits.
Satellites on Fire: when trouble finds you
The story of Satellites on Fire was not born from a market analysis or a search for opportunities. It was born from a reality. “I had friends and family who lost houses to fires in Argentina. I wanted to do something about it,” Franco remembers.
He spent months talking to firefighters and brigade members, trying to understand why these fires became so catastrophic. The reality was that forestry companies, governments and fire stations found out about the fires through calls from neighbors. In remote areas, where sometimes there was no one, fires went unnoticed until they became tragedies.
“We decided to create a solution to respond to that,” he explains. The idea was ambitious: use satellites and artificial intelligence to detect fires before they became uncontrollable. Alert the brigade members via WhatsApp so that they could act in time. Provide videos that will show how the fire would spread in the coming hours.
Learning along the way: from not knowing what a startup was to closing US$2.7 million
Franco is direct when he talks about his beginnings: “We didn’t know what a startup was when we started, we didn’t know what an entrepreneurship was.” But he had something that many around him valued: motivation, curiosity and humility.
“The most important thing was knowing that we didn’t know anything and being able to gain knowledge from people who had already gone through something similar,” he explains. He read everything he could. He looked for mentors. He asked without stopping.
The process was gradual: first close the first clients, then incorporate the first people into the team, then the first round of investment. “It was discovering step by step everything we needed to reach our objectives,” he says. I didn’t have it on the horizon that they would reach 21 countries and 26 people on the team.
Satellites on Fire: 35 minutes that can save lives
Today, Satellites on Fire processes more than 10 satellites every 10 minutes. Its artificial intelligence model detects fires on average 35 minutes before the NASA system, the most used in Latin America. “A fire benchmarking platform in the United States said that we are the fastest on the market,” Franco says proudly.
But speed is only part of the equation. The company alerts brigade members via WhatsApp so that they can act in time, provides propagation models that predict how the fire will move in the next few hours, and recently launched a parametric insurance product with Aon, the largest insurer in the world.
“We don’t need as much capital because we are software-based,” Franco emphasizes. “We don’t have to buy our own satellites, we don’t pay for access to images, we don’t pay for our own cameras. So the main investment goes to the commercial area and being able to scale as quickly as possible.”
In 2025, they helped attack 600 wildfires. But its aspirations are growing: to create a comprehensive platform for fire protection that encompasses prevention, detection, monitoring and suppression. “Over time we will also expand to suppression, being able to integrate drones that will verify and in a moment put out the fires automatically,” he advances.
Conversation with Franco from the past
At the end of the interview, Franco is asked what he would say to that 16-year-old boy, his response is simple but loaded with meaning: “Congratulations. Simply.”
And he continues: “That’s good. Clearly the path is hard and has a lot of goals and learnings, but it is worth it – even if it is in my case – it was worth every moment of destabilization and sacrifice. Where we are today, everything we learned and everything we are impacting on a global level.”
His advice for those who are starting out is realistic: “There is a lot of smoke with the advice and words that are invented in the entrepreneurial world. The most important thing and the only thing you have to do is solve a real problem for a group of people.”
