Sunny Sethi, founder of HEN Technologies, doesn’t sound like someone who’s disrupted an industry that has remained largely unchanged since the 1960s. His company builds fire nozzles — specifically, nozzles that it says put out fires up to three times faster than earlier products while conserving 67% of water. But Sethi is matter-of-fact about this achievement, more focused on what’s next than what’s already been done. And what’s next sounds a lot bigger than fire nozzles.
His path to firefighting doesn’t follow a tidy narrative. After nabbing his PhD at the University of Akron, where he researched surfaces and adhesion, he founded ADAP Nanotech, an outfit that developed a carbon nanotube-based portfolio and won Air Force Research Lab grants. Next, at SunPower, he developed new materials and processes for shingled photovoltaic modules. When he landed next at a company called TE Connectivity, he worked on devices with new adhesive formulations to enable faster manufacturing in the automotive industry.
Then came a challenge from his wife. The two had moved from Ohio to the East Bay outside San Francisco in 2013. A few years later came the Thomas Fire — the only megafire they’d ever see, they thought. Then came the Camp Fire, then the Napa-Sonoma fires. The breaking point came in 2019. Sethi was traveling during evacuation warnings while his wife was home alone with their then three-year-old daughter, no family nearby, facing a potential evacuation order. “She was really mad at me,” Sethi recalls. “She’s like, ‘Dude, you need to fix this, otherwise you’re not a real scientist.’”
A background spanning nanotechnology, solar, semiconductors, and automotive had made his thinking “bias fr …