CITRIS and the Banatao Institute

Creating information technology solutions for society's most pressing challenges

CITRIS Foundry alum WUI-Go! receives $1.2M SBIR award

Screen capture from WUI-Go! with a map of a neighborhood showing an evacuation route outlined in blue. At the bottom of the map is an audio overlay with 18 seconds elapsed out of 4 minutes, 50 seconds. Text next to map reads: Interactive map experience. Explore your routes. Use our interactive map to explore multiple evacuation routes from your location. See estimated travel times, compare different scenarios, and understand how timing affects your journey to safety. Dynamic scenario planning: Adjust departure times, vehicle counts, and other factors to see how different decisions impact your evacuation route in real-time.

WUI-Go!, a startup in the spring 2021 CITRIS Foundry cohort, has been awarded $1.23 million by the National Science Foundation (NSF) through its highly competitive Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II program.

The company is developing a personalized evacuation platform to help communities in the wildland-urban interface (WUI) prepare for and respond to emergencies. 

Using digital twin technology, traffic simulations and tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI), WUI-Go! provides residents with customized evacuation guidance and gives emergency managers adaptive planning strategies. Its initial focus is on preparedness, offering features such as virtual drills, multilingual maps and offline functionality. If tests with pilot communities prove successful, WUI-Go! plans to extend its platform into real-time evacuation support.

Screen capture from WUI-Go! showing a map of a neighborhood with an evacuation map outlined in red. A popup on the map reads: Leave 10 minutes late → ~58 minutes total. Late departures compound delay. At the bottom of the map is an audio overlay showing that 1 minute, 14 seconds have elapsed out of 4 minutes, 50 seconds. Text next to map reads: Time is critical. Every minute matters. ~58 minutes total. Leave just 10 minutes late and your evacuation time increases dramatically. Late departures compound delays. When everyone leaves at once, roads become congested quickly. Every minute of preparation time matters during an evacuation.

The company is a spinoff from the research group of CITRIS investigator Kenichi Soga, the Donald H. McLaughlin Professor in Mineral Engineering and a Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley, who in 2022 received a $2.5 million NSF grant for wildfire-preparedness work stemming from a 2019 CITRIS Seed Award.

The NSF SBIR program recognizes startups that demonstrate high technical merit, societal impact and strong commercialization potential. The program also tasks recipients with improving public scientific literacy and engagement with technology, principles at the heart of WUI-Go!’s mission to bridge the needs of emergency response agencies and residents through clear, accessible tools.

After completing the CITRIS Foundry incubator program, the company continued its journey with the NSF Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program in summer 2022. WUI-Go! officially launched that fall and received a Phase I SBIR award in December 2023 to de-risk its technology. It now enters Phase II focusing on product development and pilot deployments. 

Founded by five UC Berkeley alumni, including principal investigator Sarah Lindbergh and co-founder Tony Alex, the team brings together complementary expertise in disaster risk science, traffic engineering and product development. Its members come from programs across the Berkeley campus, including the College of Environmental Design, the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in the College of Engineering, and the Haas School of Business. 

With NSF support and pioneering community partners, WUI-Go! is working to ensure that life-saving decisions during wildfires are guided by tools built on state-of-the-art research and human-centered design.