[PRESS] · 04/16/2026
Pitching the fleet at Energy Tech Summit in Bilbao
Energy Tech Summit brought more than 1,500 founders, investors and energy operators to the Euskalduna Conference Centre in Bilbao on 15 and 16 April. Co-founder and CEO Gabriel Klein pitched the system in Compute Challengers, the summit’s startup competition, as one of fourteen finalists selected to present. No winner was declared.
The argument he made in Bilbao was an energy argument rather than a fire-service one. Wildfire is infrastructure risk. It takes out transmission lines, substations and renewable installations, and the grid carries that damage long after the fire is out. Suppression that starts in minutes instead of hours is therefore a grid resilience measure, not only a public safety one.
The premise, as the summit’s write-up put it, is that “the way to stop a large wildfire is to never let it get large.”
As with the Pepperdine coverage, this predates our rename: the summit listed the company as AdAstra Defense.