Ring Founder Returns to Fight Wildfires with AI Cameras

Jamie Siminoff, the founder and CEO of Ring, is launching a new initiative to combat wildfires using the company's doorbell cameras. The announcement comes one year after the Pacific Palisades fires destroyed the garage where Siminoff founded the company in 2012.

Ring is partnering with the nonprofit Watch Duty to introduce a feature called Fire Watch. This system will alert users to wildfires in their area and use AI to identify signs of fire captured on Ring cameras. Siminoff, who returned to Ring as CEO in early 2025, stated that the partnership is a direct response to the confusion and information gaps experienced during the 2025 fires.

Watch Duty, which provides real-time wildfire maps and alerts, saw its traffic spike to 100,000 requests per second during the crisis. The new collaboration allows users to opt-in to share images with the nonprofit, aiming to provide street-level intelligence that traditional monitoring often misses.

The site of Ring's origin is now a small patch of dirt. In January 2025, the detached garage in Pacific Palisades where Siminoff launched the video doorbell company was wiped out by wildfires.

"This looks like such a small pad where the garage was. It felt so big," Siminoff said, comparing the return to the feeling of visiting a childhood bedroom only to find it much smaller. He recalled the pride he felt for the space and the tears shed upon realizing it was gone.

The devastation in the neighborhood remains visible. Sunset Boulevard is lined with fenced-in empty lots where buildings once stood. Construction workers gather at food trucks outside local hardware stores, and ruins of a 100-year-old Spanish colonial building still stand.

Siminoff founded Ring in 2012 after realizing he couldn't hear his doorbell while working in the garage, leading to missed package deliveries. Six years later, he sold the company to Amazon for a reported $1 billion. Despite leaving Ring in 2023, the garage remained a symbol of his entrepreneurial journey.

Siminoff was out of town when the Palisades fire broke out. Upon returning, he entered the evacuation zone to find the back of his own home on fire. He and a friend extinguished the flames with a garden hose.

He described the experience of patrolling the neighborhood with neighbors as chaotic and surreal, akin to the "fog of war." They collected stray fire extinguishers and made triage decisions on which blazes to tackle.

"Once you're there, you realize you're not looking for fire — you're looking for what's going to become fire," Siminoff said.

Shortly after the disaster, Siminoff posted on Instagram, reflecting on his past success: "In that garage I created something that impacted crime. Now I sit here wondering if I could do the same with fire…"

Less than three months later, he returned to Ring as CEO. He wrote a lengthy email to Amazon leadership, including CEO Andy Jassy and founder Jeff Bezos, outlining his vision. Siminoff noted that this mission was "a big part of why I went back."

The collaboration pairs Ring's massive network of cameras with Watch Duty's specialized wildfire monitoring. Watch Duty monitors radio scanners, official government updates, and a network of mountain-top cameras to provide real-time alerts.

John Mills, cofounder and CEO of Watch Duty, described the chaos of the previous year. During the Los Angeles fires, the app was inundated with traffic, handling 100,000 requests a second. Mills noted that the team was operating with "all hands on deck," resulting in "utter mayhem" where "no one was sleeping very well for at least a month."

Watch Duty consists of 50 paid staff members and approximately 250 volunteers, many of whom are active and retired firefighters and first responders.

Mills explained the limitations of current technology: "In these wind-driven fire events, these fires are starting miles ahead of the flame front because embers, the size of footballs sometimes, are getting tossed miles in advance." While mountain-top cameras spot smoke plumes, they often miss street-level activity in canyons and hilly neighborhoods like the Palisades.

"If we don't know what's happening, we're going to be slower to respond," Mills said.

The new feature, announced Tuesday, aims to fill these gaps. Ring is donating $1 million to Watch Duty to support the effort.

The system operates in three specific ways:

• Real-time Alerts: Users receive notifications when Watch Duty identifies a wildfire in their vicinity.
• AI Detection: For Ring Protect subscribers, outdoor cameras will automatically analyze video using AI to detect smoke and fire, alerting owners to assess their property.
• Opt-in Sharing: Users inside wildfire alert zones can choose to share images from their doorbell cameras with Watch Duty. The nonprofit reviews and moderates these submissions before sharing updates to help map fire spread.

Privacy remains a key concern. Ring and Watch Duty emphasized that the system will not automatically access cameras. Instead, it alerts users during an emergency and asks for permission to provide data.

"We're not a Big Brother organization," Mills said. "We're a bunch of citizens trying to solve a problem that frankly should have been solved a long time ago."

Siminoff believes that while technology cannot stop fires from igniting, it can solve the "information issue" that plagued responders during the Palisades fire. He hopes that even saving one home will make the partnership worthwhile.