The minutes that disappear before the alarm rings
A fire in a warehouse, a stockroom, a manufacturing line, or a back-of-house corridor starts as a small flame or a localised plume of smoke, often several metres from the nearest ceiling-mounted alarm. Smoke has to reach the sensor in sufficient concentration to trigger detection, and depending on the height of the space and the airflow inside the building, that can take several minutes. Several minutes is enough for the fire to double in size and turn what would have been a contained incident into a structural one.
The cameras across the same building see the flame and the plume immediately, with the first frame of visible smoke or flickering light captured on a feed within seconds of ignition. No one is watching that feed in real time, which means the footage sits in storage as a record of a fire that has already burned by the time anyone reviews it.
This is not a failure of the alarm system, because fire alarms do exactly what they are designed to do. The point is that the alarm is not the only sensor on site, and the camera network already operating across the same building is fully capable of acting as a second one.
Cameras as the layer that catches what alarms miss
Manako deploys Vision Agents trained on early-stage fire and smoke signatures directly onto the cameras a business already owns, with no new hardware to install, no engineers to hire, and no new code to write. The Vision Agent watches every relevant feed continuously and writes a structured event the moment it sees visible smoke or flame, regardless of whether that signal has reached a ceiling sensor.
This does not replace the fire alarm, which continues to do its job exactly as designed. Manako runs alongside it as a second sensor layer that triggers seconds rather than minutes after ignition.
The event lands in the channels the operations team already uses, including Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, or any other system. The duty manager, the security desk, or the on-call maintenance lead receives a clip of the camera that detected the signal, the location on site, and a timestamp, which together let them verify visually, dispatch a response, or trigger evacuation procedures while the fire is still small enough to contain.
Inside the alert: from flame to phone in seconds
A flame appears at the back of a warehouse aisle at 02:47 when nobody is on the floor. The Vision Agent flags it within seconds, the on-call duty manager receives a clip and a location on their phone, and the site's fire response is triggered before the ceiling sensor in that aisle even registers smoke. The fire brigade arrives at a contained incident rather than a developed one.
Every event is timestamped, linked to the camera, and stored with a clip of the visual evidence, which means the same record that satisfies an insurer or an inspector after the fact also gives the business a complete trail of every fire-related signal the cameras saw across the site.
The cost gap between sixty seconds and five minutes
The cameras and the computing hardware that runs Manako both already exist on the site, which means there is no additional capital spend involved in the deployment, no replacement of existing alarms required, and no specialist hardware procured per location.
A small fire caught within sixty seconds of ignition is usually contained with a portable extinguisher. The same fire caught five minutes later can require evacuation, fire service intervention, and a closed site for days or weeks afterwards. The difference between those two outcomes is the entire business case for adding a second sensor class to the same infrastructure.
Fire detection with more than one sensor source
Fire detection has historically depended on a single class of sensor working in a single way. The cameras across most physical sites are already capable of acting as a second class, working in parallel, with a different signal source and a faster response time. The infrastructure is already in place, the footage is already being captured, and the only missing layer is the part that turns those feeds into an early operational signal.
Manako provides that layer on a single platform that runs on any camera across any environment.
Tell Manako what you need. It does the rest.
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