From Canada to Calabria to save a burning planet

Founded by Kseniya and Max Lenarciak and Davide De Marchi, the startup Sly uses artificial intelligence to promptly intercept forest fires.

The smell of smoke, the reddish glow.There are many fires That Max Lenarciak remembers living during his childhood in Calabria, mother's homeland.But it was one in particular, which he witnessed as an adult, that changed his life.

In 2020 he left the Canada, where he lived with his wife Kseniya, to spend a holiday in the splendid setting of Saint Catherine of the Ionian, in the province of Catanzaro.However, the Covid-19 pandemic forced them to stop longer than expected, and to fall in love with the region.

The birth of Sly

“After a large fire hit our agricultural estate, devastating a few hundred hectares of citrus groves and olive groves, we began to question ourselves about the existence of systems to intercept fires early, so as to prevent damage, and we decided to exploit our knowledge to create a new one starting from available technologies", say the Lenarciaks, who ended up abandoning their old jobs, both linked to the finance sector.

Together with his friend Davide De Marchi, a computational biologist originally from Veneto, have discovered a local factory semiconductors and they managed to put together a team, giving rise to the startup Sly with its own capital, to which was subsequently added that of other investors.

The team has developed some pine cone-shaped sensors to be installed in the woods.“They monitor, like a sort of 'electronic nose', the small variations in the molecular state of the air.Once they understand the information collected, they send it to us, via a protocol called LoRa, directly to our cloud.We validate them and pass them on to customers and authorities:we are working to integrate our solution within local and national operations rooms", explains De Marchi.

The impact of the fires in Calabria

Calabria is among the Italian regions most affected by the fires, together with Sicily, Sardinia And Puglia:alone, according to a report prepared byIspra Based on Effis data, these four regions represent approximately 85 percent of the areas burned nationwide in the period between January and July.Looking at the provinces, those of Agrigento, Cosenza, Reggio Calabria and Palermo lead the ranking.The over six hundred fires that inflamed the country in the first seven months of 2024 affected almost forty square kilometers of forest area, of which eighteen km² of stain Mediterranean And holm oak forests, thirteen km² of oak forests and you're from conifers.

 

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Not surprisingly, among Sly's clients there are the managers of parks natural, interested in preserving the ecosystems forestry and the incredible variety of animal and plant species they host.But they are also there companies agricultural And society energy.With Terna the possibility of also identifying the SF₆ gas, paving the way towards monitoring a much larger amount of data than just fires.Another opportunity is to detect leaks methane which, like SF₆, is highly climate-altering.“If I had to list the three main advantages of our system, I would mention versatility, along with speed and accuracy of over 98 percent,” comments Kseniya Lenarciak.

The circular economy and energy efficiency

The team has thought of everything, without even neglecting the importance ofcircular economy.“In Italy, almost 40 percent of fires occur in protected areas, such as Natura 2000 sites, where the regulation known as Hmr (Hazardous materials regulation) applies:therefore, devices such as lithium batteries cannot be placed inside them without respecting pre-established criteria", explains Max Lenarciak.“Our technology uses a monocrystalline solar panel that recharges an accumulator capable of lasting more than 100 thousand cycles, or more than ten years, without requiring materials such as nickel and lithium.The case itself is made of a recycled material, an organic-based resin.”

The use of“edge” artificial intelligence then guarantees greater energy efficiency compared to the traditional one:“The data, instead of being constantly sent from millions of sensors to a central unit, is processed directly 'on the edge', on the sensor.In this way, only the most relevant ones are sent”, point out the co-founders of Sly.

The love for Canada and for the Italian entrepreneurial fabric

One year after it was put on the market, their product was recently also sold abroad, in Spain and in States United.Now, the goal is to increase the diversification of customers and countries, until ideally also landing on market Canadian.The Lenarciaks' home country is forced to deal with devastating fires every summer, just like the nation that "adopted" them.The fires that hit it between May and October last year emitted almost 480 megatons of CO2, an amount almost five times higher than the average of the last twenty years.

A similar amount of emissions has negatively impacted air quality in North America, and some plumes of smoke have even reached Europe.This is what the Atmosphere Monitoring Service revealed Copernicus (Copernicus atmospheric monitoring service – Cams), which has already published data relating to the current year:the monthly emissions generated by the fires between the beginning of June and mid-July amount to 11.1 megatonnes of CO2 for British Columbia And 13.2 megatonnes for Alberta, extremely high values, although still far from the record ones of 2023.

In the heart of the Lenarciak there is enough space for the Canadian lands, as for the Calabrian ones.“Italy is very special for us, because there are so many talents here:engineers, researchers...", concludes Max.“And there is everything you need to launch startups:there are problems to solve, low costs, and the food is good (laughs, editor's note:).We think that the south is an excellent area to invest in software because, by putting laptops in the hands of young creatives, wonderful things can be done."