XPRIZE Wildfire

Valley Christian’s Wildfire Quest Team was initiated in July 2022 and is composed of 19 talented students led by an expert in aerospace engineering. The four-year international competition offers a total prize purse of $11M for the top teams. The team’s tight cohesion, fostered by three diverse sectors, drives student innovation, contributing to the development of their collaboration solution. Despite being the sole high school team among companies and graduate students, the Wildfire Quest team exudes confidence in their solutions and capabilities to emerge victorious.

Xprize Wilfdfire Overview
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The Global Issue

“Globally, Extreme Wildfire Events (EWEs) are becoming more frequent. EWEs burn bigger, at a higher intensity, and can quickly sprawl out of control. While they represent only around 3% of all wildfires, EWEs account for 80% of total associated fire damages and are increasingly contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions and worsening health impacts from pollutants.
These large and destructive wildfires wreak havoc on ecosystems worldwide, especially in the expanding Wildland-Urban Interface, where homes, businesses, and major infrastructure are most at risk, and where wildfire control and suppression activities are increasingly outperformed.”

XPRIZE Wildfire - The Challenge

The XPRIZE organization, recognizing this problem, initiated the XPRIZE Wildfire. XPRIZE Wildfire is a four-year international, multimillion-dollar competition with the goal of autonomously detecting and suppressing wildfires within a ten-minute timeframe.

Solutions Focused

Wildfire Quest is developing an autonomous system for early wildfire detection and suppression.

1. They’ve developed a trailer-mounted observation tower, detection software, and a drone base station unit in-house.
2. AI-enabled multi-sensor detectors from official partner, SensoRy AI, are used to identify fire heat signatures from a small fire up to 2.5 kilometers away. GPS coordinates of the fire are identified by the sensors and communicated to the drone.
3. The team’s Kaizen^TM Heavy Lift xFold^TM Dragon drone, created in partnership with Kaizen Aerospace, deploys automatic fire-extinguishing balls to suppress incipient-stage fires.

The team, which began in 2022 with nine students and now includes twenty students and two partners, continues to refine its system as the competition advances.

Competition Status

Team Wildfire Quest was established in 2022 and has achieved remarkable progress, advancing from a Top 30 position to becoming one of the Top 15 Semi-Finalists by summer 2025. The team has already earned a $25,000 award in recognition of their outstanding efforts. The journey continues as the Top 5 finalist teams will be announced at the end of January 2026.