About Canairy
Why we built Canairy
We're two people in Northern California who got tired of guessing whether the air outside was safe to breathe.
Jennifer has asthma. A lot of the time she knows the air has gone bad before any app or website says so, because she feels it first. We also have two kids, so "is it okay to go outside?" comes up a lot in our house. We kept wanting a straight answer and kept not finding one, so we built Canairy.
Wildfire season
We live in Sonoma County, and for the last several years wildfire season has kept hitting close to home. In 2017 the Tubbs Fire came through our area and we had to evacuate. In 2018 the Camp Fire burned more than a hundred miles away, but its smoke sat over the whole Bay Area for nearly two weeks, the worst air quality on record and on some days the worst anywhere in the world. PM2.5 in parts of the North Bay got close to 200 micrograms per cubic meter and the AQI ran into the 240s. The 24-hour health standard is 35. In 2019 the Kincade Fire put almost all of Sonoma County, close to 190,000 people, under evacuation orders, and we packed up and left again. In 2020 the LNU Lightning Complex and the Glass Fire brought more fire and more smoke, and that September the sky over the Bay Area turned orange in the middle of the day with the streetlights still on.
With the kids and Jennifer's asthma, the air was always on our minds.
What we actually wanted
Plenty of apps show you an AQI number. But when you're standing at the back door and the kids want to go out, a number doesn't really tell you what to do. We wanted a plain-English answer about whether it's okay right now, a heads-up by text or push before the air gets bad instead of after, and coverage for all the places we care about, not just wherever the phone happens to be.
What Canairy does
Canairy watches the air at every place you add, using PurpleAir sensors and public monitoring networks. It turns the readings into a plain-English verdict, warns you when the air is getting worse (including ahead of time, when a bad stretch is on the way), and tracks the trends so you can see when and where your air is usually worst.
That's the whole idea. It keeps an eye on the air so you don't have to.
We watch the air. You live your life.
The two of us
Jennifer Nunn
Co-creator · Product & design
Jennifer leads product and design. She spent 12 years in product roles in regulated, complicated industries, and builds software that feels like someone who has actually done the job made it. She also has asthma, so clean air isn't an abstract problem for her. Canairy is more or less the app she'd wanted for years.
Jason Curtis
Co-creator · Engineering & AI
Jason has 15 years in tech and ten in the wine industry, where he's helped more than 100 wineries use technology without it getting in the way. He thinks the best software stays out of sight and just does its job. Canairy points that at the air: watch it constantly, and only say something when it matters.
Canairy is a NunnCurtis Labs project, based in Sonoma County, California.