A Vancouver-based startup says it can prevent wildfires by suppressing the lightning that starts them, and it just secured fresh funding to push the technology further. Skyward Wildfire raised $7.9 million Canadian dollars ($5.7 million USD) in an extension of a seed round, money the company plans to direct toward product development and expanded operations.
The timing is not incidental. In 2023, nearly 7,000 fires burned tens of millions of acres across Canada, produced close to 500 million tons of carbon emissions, and forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. Lightning sparked approximately 60% of those wildfires, and those fires accounted for 93% of the total area burned.
A Bold Claim, Then a Retreat
Until recently, Skyward’s website stated the company had demonstrated technology capable of preventing “up to 100% of lightning strikes.” The claim drew scrutiny from researchers who study lightning suppression, and the company removed it after questions were raised about its accuracy.
Nicholas Harterre, who oversees government partnerships at Skyward, acknowledged the rollback. “While the statement reflected an observed result under specific conditions, it was not intended to suggest uniform outcomes,” he said. “In complex atmospheric systems, consistent 100% outcomes are not realistic, as the experts you spoke to rightly pointed out.” The company now states it has demonstrated the ability to “prevent the majority of cloud-to-ground lightning strikes in targeted storm cells.”
How It Likely Works
Skyward has not publicly detailed its method. Harterre said only that the materials used are “inert and selected in accordance with regulatory standards.” Public documents, though, point to an approach with a long paper trail: seeding clouds with metallic chaff, narrow fiberglass strands coated with aluminum.
The military has long used chaff to disrupt radar signals and confuse guided missiles. US government agencies began evaluating its potential to reduce lightning strikes as far back as the early 1960s. Field trials from that era showed some promise, though results varied by weather conditions and the scale of deployment.
Sam Goldman, Skyward’s founder and chief executive, framed the stakes plainly in a LinkedIn statement: “Preventing lightning on high-risk days saves lives, billions in wildfire costs, and is one of the highest-leverage and most immediate climate solutions available.”
Unanswered Questions
Researchers are not dismissing the concept outright, but significant unknowns remain.
- How reliably the seeding performs across varying weather and climate conditions
- How much material would need to be released, and how often
- What secondary environmental effects large-scale lightning suppression might produce
- Whether suppressing lightning in one area displaces it elsewhere
There is also a transparency concern. Some observers say Skyward appears to have conducted weather modification field trials in parts of Canada in 2024 and 2025 without wide public notice or open disclosure of what materials it introduced into the atmosphere.
Keith Brooks, programs director at Environmental Defence, a Canadian advocacy organization, put it carefully: evaluating new technologies to reduce fire risk is “reasonable,” he said, but “we should be doing so cautiously and really transparently, with a robust scientific methodology that’s open to scrutiny.”
Skyward also says it has built AI tools to predict which lightning strikes are most likely to ignite fires, a capability it describes as complementary to its suppression work. Whether the suppression itself holds up at commercial scale, under real-world variability, is still an open question the company’s next phase of development will need to address.
Photo by Erik Morales on Unsplash
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