Sceye’s wildfire detection platform has been named a winner in the General Excellence category of Fast Company’s 2026 World Changing Ideas Awards, recognizing our work to transform how wildfires are detected, monitored, and prevented.
This annual recognition honors bold and transformative efforts that tackle the world’s most pressing issues and help build a better world. A panel of Fast Company editors and reporters evaluated more than 1,500 entries based on their impact, sustainability, design, creativity, scalability, and ability to improve society.
“This recognition from Fast Company highlights the importance of building new infrastructure to address growing climate challenges,” said Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, CEO of Sceye. “Wildfires are becoming more frequent and more destructive. Persistent awareness from the stratosphere has the potential to change not only how we detect and respond to them, but how we prevent wildfires in the future.”
This recognition comes in partnership with another Fast Company honor – Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, Sceye CEO and founder, has been named a Visionary of the Year winner for his work advancing a new layer of stratospheric infrastructure to connect people and protect the planet.
Sceye’s High Altitude Platform Systems (HAPS) operate in the stratosphere to provide continuous, real-time visibility over large geographic areas. Operating as instant infrastructure in the sky, HAPS can carry any combination of high-precision infrared, hyperspectral, radar, optical, and communications payloads engineered specifically for environmental monitoring and emergency response.
From this unique vantage point, Sceye can:
- Detect ignitions within minutes
- Maintain continuous, high-resolution tracking of fire behavior
- Generate pre-fire topographic and environmental mapping
- Preserve communications and situational awareness when terrestrial networks fail
Support post-fire restoration and recovery
By staying up for an entire fire season, Sceye HAPS can provide uninterrupted visibility across tens of thousands of square miles, helping shift wildfire management from reactive to proactive, reducing detection times from hours to minutes, and improving coordination across agencies and responders. Ideally, our HAPS can be positioned before the start of a wildfire season to map the full area and provide insights to leaders for preventative measures.
We congratulate the other winners and applicants whose work is helping build a safer, more sustainable, and more resilient world.
