My name is Siddharth Thakur, I’m the Founder and CEO of Paradigm Robotics. I have been working with the company for the last two years but started this project almost 13 years ago.
In 2013, I was in Houston, Texas building little sensors to help early detection of wildfires in California. As a result of this, I started meeting firefighters in Houston and then a tragic incident happened called the Southwest Inn fire in May 2013.
The fire involved firefighters searching in a large hotel, believing there were people inside, when the roof collapsed- I knew two firefighters that died that day. I was about, 10-11 years old at the time and was just really shocked by what happened. So, I reached out to my local Fire Chief to ask what happened. Here, I learned about the dangers firefighters face and the challenges of conducting search and rescue. I also learned about the lack of technology, so I set out on a mission to build robots to help firefighters.
I think we are seeing record lows in cadets and staffing opportunities and there has been a big challenge in pushing the next generation of people to firefighting. One thing we are really excited about is how a lot of our team has been students or graduate students. I think one of the most exciting things about fire is that it’s a problem unsolved, it’s a field that is new and it’s exciting bringing technology to that.
The fire service has so much excitement and are interested in making their job safer. A lot of our students are just drawn by that energy, the ability to connect with firefighters who are just normal, affable people.
I think that the next generation also has the skills to begin work early and to be scrappy. Younger folks are founding and starting companies- you are seeing great talent at younger ages, it’s incredible.
Siddharth Thakur
A special moment was at the International Association of Fire Chiefs Technology Summit International 2024. It was the first time I’ve had ever spoken in front of 750 fire chiefs and investors at the same time. I have worked with first responders up to that point, collaborating with them and learning from them, but that was a little nerve wracking!
I was really amazed to see the support they gave me and to win the IAFC-TSI 2024 Shark Tank Award. That was just a small example of how tight knit this community is and how they were able to see something that maybe you don’t even see at the time, that was special.
Maybe even more than that, the most special thing has been with every fire station we go to. I’ve now been to hundreds and hundreds of fire stations across the county and every time they easily open the door to me and say hello and invite me to their table. I think that speaks one, to the power of the community, and two, how we try to understand every problem from the ground up. That is what we are really hoping to do.
Once we bring our FireBot into more departments, we are seeing folks go “I can see how this could be used,” or “this has really helped.” As we grow, we are seeing a lot more real use cases and deployments.
My thing is, I want to make a practical product that helps firefighters, I want to make a tool, whether it’s a robot or a not. I think robots are neat, but in the end, it’s just a tool to solve a problem and that’s why I think robots are the future of firefighting.
Right now, the key is we need force multipliers. On the volunteer firefighting side we have major staffing shortages, even into the career side and across all departments you have budget changes. There are also challenges with not having enough people to show up.
The robots are a force multiplier because they are not the cost of the person they support in roles and functions that often firefighters don’t want to do, or they are more dangerous. They also allow you to do that job faster, safer and more efficiently and I think in the long run, robots allow firefighters to do the more technical, challenging and mentally intensive jobs while keeping them out of harm’s way.
We like to say, we don’t want to take the fun part away from firefighting. We want to give them the ability to do the fun stuff and we’ll do the things they don’t want to do.
What we’ve focused on is HAZMAT, so spills, leaks, explosions, supporting the reconnaissance phase. All sorts of things, we, on average, can reduce the reconnaissance times by 24x so we can really speed up this process and save costs. You don’t have to use expensive class A or class B suits because we’re very easy to decontaminate.
We also do a lot of work in search and rescue, so we can help speed up search by 20x doing primary search and structures, even in high-risk situations, like warehouses, commercials.
Siddharth Thakur
The goal in any hazardous situation, from fire to explosion to a leak, is that you don’t want to send people in because you don’t really know what’s happening. So, you send the robot in.
We’re working with many different companies to establish partnerships like Darley, and Rosenbauer, but also alongside insurance companies to validate this work and make sure the data shows in the long term while reducing injuries for departments. We are really excited about the data we are able to create when mitigating risks.
Yeah, there’s a lot of issues- I think the funny thing is, we started this whole endeavour when I was 10-11 years old and FireBot was the obvious name at the time. I didn’t even learn about trademarks and things, so now I think wow, it turns out there’s a lot of FireBots out there! I don’t think the fire service care about the name, they understand it is a tool and they like the product- so we will stick with it.
The goal is to serve other industries as well, our platform is expanded to also serve defence, police and law enforcement and industrial clients.
Siddharth Thakur
On a technical front, a challenge was how this was a massive research endeavour. It took 10 years from testing on my backyard grill and not burning the house down, to now, burning at training ranges. Doing the thermos mechanical and electrical design, researching complex material science and how the robots are not just fireproof but bulletproof, waterproof, CBRNE resistant and cost effective and scalable.
It’s not a million dollar product, it’s a product that anyone can buy- which is one of our goals. This is why it took a while to build out and become scalable and rugged, a lot of technology went into it.
We’ve just launched a new product and we’ve done dozens of demos and early pilots. Now we’re building out the next couple robots and so we’re giving them to our early customers, or early partners. We’ll be engaging in yearlong deployments, operational tests, long pilots.
Moving into next year, we’re going to scale and hopefully get dozens of robots out there. We want to build our and ensure we are supporting firefighters and first responders all over. That is where the process will be over the next few years, to build out the next version of our platform, target through the private fire marker and continue expanding to the municipal marker while beginning to serve law enforcement as well.
Our goal is to be a cost effective, scalable ground robot company that is bringing robots to the forefront and changing how people look at them. We want you to look at a robot and go “I couldn’t send that into half the things I do in my day-to-day job, but now I can.”
