SAN FRANCISCO, CA — June 17, 2026 — Earth Fire Alliance (EFA) today announced a $26 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund in support of the FireSat program — a satellite constellation that will generate an unprecedented, near real-time global dataset on wildfire and its effects on the planet and our communities. The grant, the largest single philanthropic commitment to wildfire detection to date, will fund the launch and operations of the first three operational FireSat satellites set to go into orbit in Q3 2026, and includes dedicated support for on-the-ground adoption and use of FireSat data by fire agencies, land managers, and communities in the Amazon Basin, one of the most fire-vulnerable regions on Earth.

The Bezos Earth Fund commitment brings EFA’s total funding to $69.2M to date, reflecting a growing coalition of mission-aligned supporters that also includes $15.5M in funding from Google.org, $12.5M from the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, and $15.2M from additional, anonymous, and individual supporters.

The FireSat protoflight, which launched in March 2025, is already collecting sample data and demonstrating the powerful impact FireSat will have on communities worldwide. By the end of 2026, FireSat’s first operational satellites will provide wildfire monitoring at least twice daily over the world’s more fire-prone geographies, including a near-term focus on the Amazon Basin.

By 2029, the growing FireSat constellation will detect fires as small as 5×5 meters—roughly the size of a standard shipping container—anywhere on the planet within 1 hour, enabling earlier intervention when necessary to prevent large, catastrophic fires. Once fully operational in the early 2030s with approximately 50 satellites, FireSat will monitor every point on Earth every 20 minutes or less. With this unprecedented capability to detect small fires in near real-time, there is vast potential to protect homes, communities, and biodiversity while also reducing carbon emissions from wildfires by an estimated 5–10% annually.

Early wildfire detection is among the highest-leverage interventions available. Developed for EFA by space systems company Muon Space, FireSat represents a fundamental leap in how the world detects, responds to, and understands wildfires. These advanced infrared satellites can detect small, cool fires within minutes of ignition and deliver high-resolution data to fire agencies and scientists in near real time.

“At the Bezos Earth Fund, we’re focused on supporting innovation that helps solve some of the hardest challenges in climate and nature, and breakthrough technology that addresses the challenges with uncontrolled wildfires is an important area that our funding can help move forward, faster,” said Tom Taylor, Bezos Earth Fund President and CEO. “Advancing detection and prevention technologies such as FireSat have incredible potential to better protect homes and communities, preserve forests and biodiversity, and reduce emissions, and we’re excited to be working together on these areas.”

EFA operates on a public-private-philanthropic partnership, or “P4” model, uniting commercial innovation, end-user co-development, and philanthropic and government investment around a shared goal: collecting and delivering critical wildfire data to every corner of the globe. Radical collaboration across sectors is one of the nonprofit’s core operating principles and was fundamental to the development of FireSat.

“The Bezos Earth Fund’s commitment to Earth Fire Alliance and the FireSat program sends an unmistakable signal,” said EFA Executive Director Brian Collins. “With the support of global, high-impact organizations like Bezos Earth Fund—alongside Google.org, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, other funders, and the wildfire community that helped shape this technology—Earth Fire Alliance and FireSat will bring critical new tools to firefighters, scientists, and policymakers in their efforts to strengthen wildfire resilience. The combined expertise, resources, and credibility of EFA’s growing, global coalition helps us not only build and launch innovative technology but also ensures our mission doesn’t end in orbit, and that this unprecedented data will reach the firefighters, land managers, and communities who need it most.”

Fire agencies and scientific organizations worldwide helped shape FireSat’s design and have already committed to use its data, partnering with EFA through its Early Adopter program. Their participation reflects the urgent, practical demand for faster, more reliable fire data on the ground. In addition to agencies and organizations in the Amazon region, FireSat Early Adopters include leading fire organizations in California, Colorado, Oregon, Texas, Africa, Australia, and Portugal.

As the FireSat constellation grows, EFA is building additional programs to ensure its data is globally accessible and actionable. FireConnect will work with communities, firefighters, land managers, and researchers globally to connect wildfire data to on-the-ground decision-making. FireImpact will translate FireSat’s global dataset and EFA’s growing partner network into actionable scientific knowledge, informing fire management strategies that minimize devastating impacts while preserving fire’s essential role in healthy ecosystems.

About Earth Fire Alliance

Earth Fire Alliance (EFA) is a global nonprofit coalition building the technological infrastructure the world needs to detect, monitor, and understand fire — and delivering critical data to the firefighters, scientists, and communities who need it most. EFA’s flagship program, FireSat, is the first satellite constellation designed specifically to address the wildfire challenge: generating an unprecedented dataset on fire and its effects on people and the planet. EFA partners with operational agencies, scientists, and technologists across continents to make fire data globally accessible, actionable, and available for the public good. 

EFA Media Contact: Kristin Q. Cody, press@earthfirealliance.org

About the Bezos Earth Fund

The Bezos Earth Fund, guided by the belief that Earth is the best planet in this solar system, works to protect and restore the natural world. Working with partners around the globe, we are developing innovative solutions to ensure the planet remains a place we can — and want to — live on. Based in the United States, the organization is led by CEO Tom Taylor, under the direction of Chairman Jeff Bezos and Vice Chair Lauren Sánchez Bezos. To learn more, visit: bezosearthfund.org

Source: Earth Fire Alliance

Company Contributes to 300mm Wafer-Scale Superconducting Qubit Manufacturing and Workforce Development

ELMSFORD, N.Y.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–SEEQC, Inc. (“SEEQC” or the “Company”), a developer and manufacturer of scalable, energy efficient digital chips for quantum computing systems, today announced its participation in a four-year Microelectronics Commons Northeast Regional Defense Technology Hub (NORDTECH) program. As one of eight U.S. Microelectronics Commons hubs, NORDTECH collaborates with regional partners across New York State and the United States to enable innovative R&D projects and advance critical lab-to-fab innovations in direct support of Department of War objectives, while also supporting workforce development goals.

The NORDTECH project is aimed at advancing scalable fabrication of superconducting qubits using next-generation materials on 300mm industrial-grade silicon wafers. SEEQC is a subcontractor to NY CREATES (Albany, NY) and collaborates with academic, industry, and government partners including Cornell University, NYU, Princeton University, Syracuse University, Quantum Circuits / D-Wave, and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

The program focuses on improving materials such as tantalum (Ta) and tantalum nitride (TaN) for high-coherence qubit fabrication and establishing scalable manufacturing processes within a U.S.-based 300mm wafer fabrication environment.

SEEQC’s role includes:

• Developing a high-throughput, high-fidelity cryogenic qubit evaluation platform
• Providing performance feedback to fabrication teams
• Development of one of the world’s first quantum Process Design Kits (PDK) within the Cadence EDA ecosystem
• Supporting integration of qubit designs compatible with SEEQC’s digital SFQ-based control architecture

Scaled, standardized quantum chip processing is expected to accelerate research, improve fabrication repeatability, and strengthen domestic manufacturing capabilities.

“Industrial-scale quantum fabrication requires both materials innovation and reliable evaluation infrastructure,” said Dr. Oleg Mukhanov, Chief Scientific Officer of SEEQC. “Our work supports the transition from laboratory-scale experimentation to repeatable, scalable quantum chip production.”

“The U.S. Microelectronics Commons hubs, like NORDTECH, are foundational to building resilient U.S. semiconductor and quantum supply chains,” said John Levy, CEO of SEEQC. “SEEQC is proud to contribute our expertise in digital superconducting technology to a national effort aimed at accelerating quantum innovation.”

The program also includes workforce development initiatives, including educational content and experiential internship opportunities across participating institutions.

About SEEQC
SEEQC is building quantum computers on a chip. SEEQC’s digital chip technology is designed to make quantum systems scalable, energy efficient, and commercially viable. The company operates advanced chip development and fabrication facilities in the United States and Europe. More than three-quarters of SEEQC’s workforce hold Ph.D. degrees across physics, electrical engineering, materials science, computer science, and related disciplines.

Contacts

Media & Investor Contact: SEEQC@icrinc.com

Source: Businesswire

Normal Computing has raised $50 million in a round led by Samsung Catalyst as the startup pursues a two-pronged bet on the future of AI hardware: using AI to help semiconductor companies design chips more efficiently, while also developing a new kind of processor aimed at reducing energy use.

New investors include Galvanize, Brevan Howard Macro Venture Fund, and ArcTern Ventures, alongside existing backers Celesta Capital, Drive Capital, Eric Schmidt’s First Spark Ventures, and Micron Ventures.

CEO Faris Sbahi told Fortune the company’s software platform is already being used by more than half of the top 10 semiconductor companies by revenue, as it targets one of the industry’s biggest challenges: the rising cost and complexity of designing advanced AI chips, where even small errors can lead to expensive delays and rework.

Designing advanced AI chips has become so complex that even getting a design to “tape-out”—the point where it’s finalized for manufacturing—is increasingly prone to costly failure. Modern AI chips, which pack in tens of billions of transistors to support today’s frontier models, can cost more than $500 million to develop before a single unit ships.

Normal, founded in 2022 by former engineers and scientists from Google Brain, Google X, and Palantir, is also using its chip design software internally to build its own experimental AI hardware. It has already taped out a prototype chip using the company’s “thermodynamic” approach, which uses the inherent randomness of physical systems to compute more efficiently than traditional GPUs. It’s an early step in a longer-term effort to significantly reduce the energy demands of AI.

“The mission of the company is to go after this so-called AI energy crisis,” said Sbahi. “Data centers are expected to hit an energy wall around 2030, and most of the strategy now is to find new ways to acquire more energy—but our position is to solve the problem in terms of the hardware that we’re using.”

Seeking alternatives to existing AI hardware

Normal Computing is part of a growing group of startups exploring alternatives to conventional AI hardware, including Unconventional AI, led by former Intel AI chief Naveen Rao, which raised a $475 million seed round in January led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures. Another is Extropic, which is developing probabilistic AI chips based on a different technical approach.

Sbahi said the company chose the name “Normal Computing” to reflect its view that its approach is closer to how computation should naturally work. “We think this is the more normal way of computing,” he said, pointing to how the company’s software and hardware are designed to align with the underlying physics. “The software really matches the hardware.”

While building energy-efficient AI chips is the company’s long-term goal—initially focused on inference workloads for generative AI—the current fundraise will focus on scaling Normal’s commercial software business.

“Hopefully someday we’ll be integrated into mainstream semiconductor design manufacturing,” said Sbahi. He added that the semiconductor industry’s high costs and complexity make it difficult for new approaches to break in, which is why Normal has focused on working with existing chipmakers rather than trying to disrupt the system from the outside.

“It’s very expensive to make mistakes,” he said.

Source: Fortune

After welcoming Vitruvian Partners as its new majority owner, Aquabyte CEO, Steve Tucker, sat down with Dinesh Ganesan from ArcTern to reflect on the journey behind the deal. 

In the conversation, Steve shares what it really takes to scale a deep-tech company — from building AI that works in the real world to growing a global business from Norway. He also offers candid advice for founders preparing for an exit, stressing the importance of honesty, culture, and choosing partners you want to work with long after the transaction closes. 

Aquabyte’s story highlights how long-term company building, customer focus, and disciplined execution lay the groundwork for successful ownership transitions. 

“A majority transaction isn’t just a new owner — it’s a new partner.” 
“Don’t oversell. You’re looking for someone to help take the business further.” 

Watch the full video below. 

Read more about Aquabyte and Vitruvian here.