Fire doesn’t wait for permission, and neither does innovation. Sonic Fire Tech just raised $3.5M in seed funding to push infrasound fire suppression from concept to commercial reality. Headquartered in Rocky River, Ohio, just outside Cleveland, the company is led by Co-Founder, CEO & CTO Geoff Bruder and Co-Founder & Chairman Michael Thomas, two minds from completely different worlds who met on LinkedIn and decided to build something the planet actually needs. Bruder spent years at NASA Glenn Research Center engineering thermoacoustic systems and designing rigs for spacecraft. Thomas, a lawyer by trade, was haunted by what fire can take from people. Together, they built a subwoofer-powered prototype in a driveway and knocked out a fire from 7 feet away. The science worked. The sound just needed to drop a few octaves lower, into the realm of infrasound, below 20 Hz, where fire loses its breath.
The $3.5M seed round was co-led by Khosla Ventures, Third Sphere, and AirAngels, joined by a few sharp angels who know a real ignition point when they see one. Rajesh Swaminathan from Khosla Ventures called it straight: traditional suppression tools weren’t built for today’s wildfire reality. He’s right. Every year wildfires torch up to $893B in damages across the U.S., and with 44M homes sitting in the Wildland-Urban Interface, that’s not a market gap, it’s a national emergency. Sonic Fire Tech isn’t waiting for insurance companies to figure it out. It’s building the tech that might bring them back to California.
Their core tech is wild, literally. Instead of spraying water or chemicals, Sonic Fire Tech uses a massive reciprocating piston to generate infrasound waves that smother combustion before it can roar to life. No PFAS, no residue, no ear-shattering noise, no waiting for the cavalry. Just quiet, immediate suppression that runs off-grid and never runs out of suppressant. The system uses Optect’s next-gen sensors from the UK, sensitive enough to catch a fire behind vegetation in half a second. Bruder calls it “throwing every speaker design in the trash and starting from scratch.” He’s not exaggerating.
The company’s lineup hits three fronts: the Home Defense System for high-risk estates, the Sonic Backpack for firefighters, and High-Value Asset Protection for data centers and utilities. Six patents, a demo with San Bernardino County Fire, contracts with PG&E, and its first shipment to Germany in March 2025, all proof that this isn’t vaporware. With plans to produce 500 units by Q2 2026, this funding will accelerate certification, scale manufacturing, and roll out 50 pilot installs by early 2026.
