Trident Sensing was founded in 2014 after its founder, Steve Pollard, had a close call with wildfires at his home in rural Utah. After noticing smoke clouds rising over the horizon, he searched online for information on the fire to no avail. After driving towards the source of the smoke, he found no fire crews, but instead a green plastic lawn chair with a stack of fliers held under a rock. The fliers were several days old and offered little relief to the community. He wondered if a new class of thermal cameras could be used to map the fire and tell the public exactly where the fire is in real time. Fast forward two years of development with a team of three university interns, and the concept of TACFI-RS was born.

After two research and development grants from the USDA and further development in conjunction with NASA, TACFI-RS has matured into a commercially available system backed by a talented engineering and manufacturing team based in Salt Lake City. Now, Trident has grown to encompass many more products, backed by many leading agencies.