Meet the team.
Valkyrie Holmes
Founder, CEO
Valkyrie has dedicated the last two years to the wildfire industry, first working on a startup aiming to build an alternative method of containment and now pivoting to climate mitigation.
Over the last three years, she’s completed a data science internship at NASA's SEES Institute for Earth Science and recently spent the summer working in electrical engineering on the Falcon team at SpaceX. She became a fellow of the 776 Foundation to work full-time on fighting climate change.
Amanda Southworth
Founder, CTO
Amanda Southworth has built and launched web and mobile applications specifically focused on complex communities and social issues, with a focus on user safety, accessibility, and privacy since 2015.
Prior to Faura, she founded and runs Astra Labs, worked as Head of Product at Vylto, with Apple in 2018 to develop a Today At Apple lab, as then with advised with PBS, Godiva, Target and more.
Baby Amanda committing an OSHA violation.
Why us?
High-risk areas are everywhere.
Amanda grew up in Southern California forests where her dad owned a newspaper distribution business that served the San Bernardino mountains.
Most of her childhood was filled with evacuations, helping people rebuild after losing everything, and watching her dad prepare their distribution warehouse in case it was burned to the ground.
Anywhere she lived in her adult life on the West Coast has required wildfire evacuation at some point.
Wildfires don’t just affect high-risk areas.
They can sometimes spread to other entire states.
Valkyrie grew up in Las Vegas her entire life, an area without frequent natural disasters. A couple years back, she realized that a lot of the smoke from California migrated and polluted the air above Downtown. “We live in a valley and all of the smoke and ash gather where my family lives, my friends work, and my sisters go to school. This is personal.”