This profile is part of the Sacramento Business Journal's Inno Under 25 feature.
Sacramento Inno Under 25 recognizes entrepreneurs, innovators, founders and scientists in the Sacramento regional business ecosystem.
These talented young people are trailblazers who have seen opportunities, created new products or started their own companies at an age when many people are still trying to figure out what they want to be when they grow up. The candidates are all under 25 by the end of this year, and they live or work in local counties.
Bowen Kyle, 24
Co-founder and chief technology officer, Ladris Technologies Inc.
Bowen Kyle is originally from Nevada City. He started working on the kernel of what would become Ladris Technologies Inc. when he was a sophomore at University of California Berkeley.
He was compelled to the project by wildfires and urban firestorms like the Camp Fire, which tore through the Butte County town of Paradise late in 2018.
Ladris Technologies, founded in 2019, uses artificial intelligence and data models to forecast the impacts of disasters on people and infrastructure so governments can better respond with effective evacuation plans in real time.
The software-as-a-service company uses open-source data like geography, road maps and other mapping along with live satellite data on wildfire, fuel moisture and fuel land cover to create a geography simulation that maps the best lifeline evacuation for threatened people, he said.
The data inputs are not the secret sauce in the modeling; rather, it is how the data is used with artificial intelligence to turn the information into a lifeline for an evacuation from a threat.
In California, the escape routes are from wildfires, but similar data could be used in other geographies to map escape routes from floods or hurricanes, Kyle said.
The company has customers in six states.
“We want to help people and agencies prepare and prevent things like Paradise,” he said.
Kyle went on to get his degree from Berkeley in applied mathematics and computer science. Ladris has 18 employees, and it works remotely, though it has a meeting room in Sacramento, which will be the home of the company when it gets a permanent office, which it is considering, he said. As it is, he’s in Sacramento often these days.
The company has bootstrapped its growth from its own revenue, which it doesn’t disclose, he said. “We’ve grown a little slower because of it."
