HERD — The Elephants Heard It First. Now We Will Too.

Name: HERD One infrasound sensor (pre-order)
Brand: HERD
Price: 25.00 USD
Availability: PreOrder

Where we honestly are

An open experiment — not a finished alarm.

We'd rather under-promise and show our work. Here's exactly what HERD is today, what it could become, and the one thing we're testing before anything else.

HERD today

A research network you can join

An open science mission, a low-cost infrasound sensor in development, a public library of 75 sources, and a community building it in the open.

HERD tomorrow

Early detection, if it proves out

A dense citizen network whose open data could one day give coastal communities extra minutes — as a complement to official systems, never a replacement.

What we test first

Can cheap sensors beat the noise?

Before any mass launch we measure one thing: can a network of $25 barometers catch a real low-frequency event with an acceptable false-alarm rate?

HERD is a research network and open data — a complement to official warning systems, not a certified alarm. How we prove it →

December 26, 2004 · 07:58 local time

By the time the wave reached Phuket, the animals were already in the hills.

Khao Lak and Phuket, Thailand

That morning, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake tore open the ocean floor off the coast of Sumatra. The tsunami took more than two hours to reach the Thai coastline. There was time. There was no warning.

Witnesses across the region told the same story: elephants trumpeted and broke their chains as they fled uphill, dogs refused to go to the beach, flamingos abandoned their low-lying nests — all of it before the water came.

The leading scientific explanation is infrasound: sound below 20 Hz, inaudible to humans. Both the earthquake itself and the wave generate it. Traveling through air and ground, it moves many times faster than a tsunami.
Elephants communicate in infrasound. They are, in effect, walking low-frequency antennas.

We can't put an elephant in every home. But we can put in something that listens to the world the way an elephant does.

Why minutes decide everything

227,000+

lives were taken by the 2004 tsunami across 14 countries — many died in places the wave reached more than an hour after the quake.

~340 m/s

the speed of infrasound in air — several times faster than a tsunami in the open ocean (~200 m/s), and incomparably faster near the shore.

10 minutes

of warning is enough to get 800 meters from the shore or climb to the third floor. In 2004, that was the price of a life.

2022

the infrasound wave from the Hunga Tonga eruption circled the Earth several times and was recorded by sensors worldwide. The physics is proven.

Watch — “They Heard It First”90 seconds · why HERD exists

December 2004. This is what a coastline without warning looked like.

Documentary reconstruction of scenes from those days

Khao Lak after the 2004 tsunami: a fishing boat thrown far inland — Khao Lak. Fishing boats were found a kilometer inland — the wave carried them through villages like driftwood.

Flooded hotel grounds in Phuket after the 2004 tsunami — Phuket. The beachfront hotels took the first hit — the people on the shore didn't get a single minute of warning.

Residents and elephants clearing debris after the tsunami, a temple on high ground left standing — The first days after the wave: everyone cleared the debris together — helped by those very same elephants. The temples on high ground survived.

Science

One sensor hears noise. A hundred thousand sensors hear the ocean.

A single cheap microbarometer can't tell a tsunami from a slammed door. But when thousands of sensors along a coastline pick up the same low-frequency signature — in the right order, with the right geographic delays — that's no longer noise. That's an event. It's exactly how Google turned ordinary smartphones into a global earthquake detector.

The HERD sensor network along the coastlines of Asia

The goal: one continuous "ear" along the coastlines of the Indian Ocean and the Ring of Fire

T + 0 minutes

The ocean speaks

An undersea earthquake or eruption produces infrasound — pressure waves below 20 Hz that race through the atmosphere, outrunning any tsunami.

T + minutes

The network hears

Every HERD sensor streams 50 readings per second to the cloud, along with its GPS coordinates. Algorithms cross-match signals from thousands of stations by time and location.

Before the wave arrives

The signal rises

When enough independent sensors agree, the event is registered, cross-checked against seismic data, and published openly — to scientists, agencies, and every member of the network.

The evidence base and research library →

Not just tsunamis · Volcanoes

Volcanoes scream in infrasound. And we know exactly where they stand.

An eruption is the loudest infrasound source on the planet: the 2022 Hunga Tonga blast was heard by sensors around the world. And volcanoes give us one enormous advantage: the danger is geographically predictable. Merapi, Taal, Mayon, Sinabung — we already know every mountain with millions of people living beside it. Which means we know where the HERD network needs to be dense from day one.

The same $25 sensor listens to both the ocean and the mountain. Two threats covered — without a single extra component.

~800 million

people live within 100 km of an active volcano

127

active volcanoes in Indonesia alone — more than anywhere else on Earth

0.01–20 Hz

the infrasound range of eruptions — exactly the band HERD One hears

53 of 53

stations in the global IMS network recorded the Hunga Tonga eruption

A volcanic eruption with infrasound waves radiating outward

HERD One

A scientific instrument that looks like a smart-home gadget.

High-precision MEMS barometer, 50 readings per second — sensitive across the 0.01–20 Hz infrasound range
GPS module: the sensor knows where it stands — the network builds itself automatically
Powered by any USB port, Wi-Fi, set up in 90 seconds
A bonus every single day: a precision weather station — pressure, weather fronts, storm warnings
Your station appears on the live network map under any name you choose
All network data is open — free to scientists, forever

For residents of Thailand and coastal regions

฿249 ≈ $7

The local price. Subsidized by international sales and sponsors: the network needs to be dense exactly where people live — not just where tourists stay.

International price

$25

Every international purchase pays to make sensors cheaper for coastal villages. Buy one — help place another.

Reserve yours — Batch #1 Inside the device: schematics & costs →

The HERD One sensor — a scientific instrument in a smart-home gadget's body

Radical transparency

Where your $25 goes. To the cent. In public.

HERD was built by people from audit and AML compliance — including the creator of SOURCEReady, a source-of-funds verification system. Hence the project's core principle: not a single number you can't verify. No "marketing" percentage for charity. Here is the full breakdown of every sensor sold — published quarterly, with an audit.

$13

Actual first-batch cost: components, assembly, certification, delivery to your door, support, returns

Operations and development: firmware, cloud, the team. Breakdown published quarterly.

To The Ten Minutes Foundation — fixed, from every device. Every sensor buys someone ten minutes.

Honestly: the $9 unit cost we dream about is only achievable at 10,000+ units. The first batches cost more — around $13 each — and we're not hiding it. When volume grows and costs fall, the difference goes not into margin, but into lowering the local price for coastal residents — this rule is written into the charter. We publish the audited actual cost of every batch.

HERD Ltd

Operating company

Builds and sells the sensors, develops the analytics platform
Earns revenue from government contracts, insurers, and API access — not from sensor margins
Can raise investment to scale up production

The sensor isn't the product. The sensor is the door into the network.

The Ten Minutes Foundation

Independent board · public reporting

Ten minutes of warning means 800 meters from the shore, or the third floor. It means a life. The Foundation exists to give those minutes to millions of people.
Owns the network's open dataset — it can never be sold or closed off
Funds the elephant research lab and scientific grants
Subsidizes sensors for coastal villages, schools, and fishing communities

Modeled on the Raspberry Pi Foundation, Mozilla, Signal.

The network's brain

One analytics center. A hundred thousand ears — a single sense of hearing.

The network's data processing center: waveforms, spectrograms, and a real-time event map

The stream

Raw data from every station

Each station streams pressure readings and coordinates. Billions of measurements a day from the coastlines of five countries.

Correlation

Algorithms look for agreement

Machine learning separates trucks and thunderstorms from geophysical events: a real signal moves across the map at a physically correct speed.

Openness

Everything visible to everyone

A live map, live waveforms, every detected event. Members see exactly what we see. No closed rooms.

The HERD Lab · Thailand

A campus where the senior research staff are elephants.

Elephants are the finest infrasound detectors nature ever built: they hear what our instruments are only learning to recognize. We're building the world's first laboratory where elephants and sensors listen to the planet together — and we calibrate the technology against a living benchmark.

The HERD lab campus in the Thai jungle — concept

Campus concept: open pavilions, solar panels, free-roaming elephants, and sensor stations across the grounds

A HERD researcher with an elephant and a tablet showing a waveform

What we'll study

Elephant hearing as the benchmark. Non-invasive wearable sensors on the animals (with veterinarians and an ethics committee) + infrasound stations all around. When an elephant reacts to a signal before our instruments do — we learn from it and improve the algorithms.

Behavior before events. Systematic recording of what in 2004 existed only as eyewitness stories: precisely how animals sense an approaching catastrophe.

Phase one — this year: a partnership with an ethical elephant sanctuary in Thailand, our stations on its grounds, one full-time researcher, and an open scientific journal for the project. The dream campus is the next step, once the network and the Foundation are standing on their own feet.

Life at the lab

This is what our work will look like: a field station at the sanctuary, real-time monitoring, and elephants as full members of the research team.

Scientists watching waveforms next to an elephant at a field station

The team in a field lab: a map of the Andaman coast, a sensor being assembled

A researcher with a portable station and elephants at the sanctuary

Roadmap

From one prototype to a hundred thousand ears.

Phase 1 · Now

Prototype and sanctuary

Station #1 in Phuket. The elephant sanctuary partnership. Registering the company and the Foundation. Gathering the first hundred members.

Phase 2 · +6 months

100 stations · Andaman

The first batch of sensors on the Andaman coast. The first correlation data. Publishing the methodology and opening the live map.

Phase 3 · +18 months

10,000 stations · 5 countries

Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India. Dense sensor rings around Merapi, Taal, and other volcanoes. Mass production, the ฿249 local price.

Phase 4 · The goal

100,000+ · The campus

Full coverage of the Indian Ocean. The laboratory campus. A system validated by independent science — a candidate for the official warning infrastructure.

the first station is being built in Phuket — with an open journal from day one

from every sensor goes to The Ten Minutes Foundation — fixed and auditable

5 countries

in the first wave: TH · ID · PH · LK · IN

1 billion+

people live in tsunami and eruption risk zones across Asia

Autonomous Outposts · The frontier

We're pushing the ears out to sea — onto the islands that hear the open ocean first.

In 2004 the wave came out of the southwest, from the Sunda Trench — and the coast had no warning, because nothing was listening offshore. We're fixing that. We're placing self-powered listening posts on the outer Andaman islands: the first land an open-ocean signal ever reaches. Solar-powered, connected over a single SIM, delivered and serviced by drone. No grid. No homes. No blind spot between the deep ocean and the shore.

Map of HERD autonomous outposts across the outer Andaman islands, with the tsunami wavefront sweeping in from the southwest

Forward listening posts on the outer Andaman islands — the gates an open-ocean signal crosses first, on its way to Phuket, Khao Lak and Krabi

Surin

~55 km offshore — the northern gate, first to hear a Sunda-Trench event

Similan

the western gate off Khao Lak — the coast 2004 hit hardest

Tarutao · Lipe

the southern gate — guarding the deep-south Andaman approach

Ko Ra · Phra Thong

the barrier islands shielding Khao Lak — local minutes that decide everything

Runs on sunlight. A listening post sips power — a small solar panel and battery ride out the monsoon, with no grid for kilometers.
One SIM per island. Infrasound is tiny data — under 5 MB a month in eco mode — so a single cellular link carries a whole outpost (and where there's no signal, a satellite IoT link does).
Deployed by drone. Delivered, inspected and resupplied from the air — we reach the rocks and reefs no technician could maintain by boat.
Built for the sea. Sealed against salt, sun and storm. The network is designed to lose nodes and keep hearing — redundancy is the whole point.

A few outer Gulf of Thailand islands join the map too — for storm and weather coverage, and network density where it helps. But the Andaman gates come first: that's where the minutes are won.

Open invitation · Connectivity sponsor

One mobile operator can light up every island that warns the coast.

The signal is the one thing we can't carry out there ourselves.

Every outpost needs connectivity — and that's the perfect place for a telecom partner. We're inviting a mobile operator to power the network: SIMs and low-power IoT data for the posts, and coverage reached out to the islands that need it. The data is tiny; the story is enormous.

In return: your brand on the live network map beside every island you connect, an auditable record of how many outposts you lit up, and a place in the early-warning system Asia has been waiting for — under the UN's "Early Warnings for All" banner.

Become the connectivity sponsor

For partners · How the network sustains itself

For people in danger zones, the network is free. Those who benefit from its data pay for it.

We don't make money on sensor margins — and we never will. The project stands on three pillars: corporate sponsorship, government contracts, and open science that makes the network's data authoritative.

For companies

For governments and emergency services

B2G · Early warning

Priority real-time access to network events — on top of existing seismic systems, never instead of them
Two threats, one network: tsunamis on the coastlines and infrasound monitoring of eruptions around known volcanoes
Coverage densification on request: sensors in the districts you need within weeks, not years
Integration with national alert systems and emergency protocols
Pilot projects under UNDRR and "Early Warnings for All" programs

Request a pilot

For scientists

Open data · Free forever

Full access to raw waveforms from every station in the network — no fees and no restrictions for research
A real-time API and a historical archive in scientific formats
Grants from The Ten Minutes Foundation for research into infrasound and animal behavior
Co-authorship: the network's methodology is published openly, and we're looking for the people who will prove it — or disprove it

Get data access

The fourth pillar is insurance: the network's data on real events is exactly what insurers and reinsurers need for parametric products. If you're in this industry — write to us.

Read this before you buy

We're not selling a guarantee.
We're inviting you into an experiment.

Let's be honest with each other. Today, no consumer device on Earth can promise to warn you of a tsunami or an eruption — and anyone who promises that is lying. Here's what we actually promise: your sensor will become one node in the densest infrasound listening network in history. It might take a year. It might take ten. But if one day this network gives a single coastline ten extra minutes — every bit of this will have been worth it. At last, in our lifetime.

The HERD Pledge

No false promises. Until the system is validated by independent science, HERD is a research network — not a certified alarm.
Open data. Every reading from every sensor is published openly — for researchers and warning services.
Transparent money. The cost breakdown and the Foundation's reports are published with an audit. Every cent is verifiable.
Science first. We work with universities and publish our methods — including our failures.

Support R&D

Want to give the project more than $25?

You can support development with any amount. Honestly and plainly: this is neither a donation nor an investment — it's R&D support for HERD Pte. Ltd., a commercial company. You don't get equity or a tax deduction. What you do get: your name on the list of the network's first co-authors, a spending report every quarter, and our word that every dollar goes into sensors, the Phuket station, and the algorithms.

By card — any amount

Payments via Stripe: cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and local Asian methods. Every contribution goes into a public quarterly spending report.

Once The Ten Minutes Foundation is registered, we'll open a separate channel specifically for charitable giving.

Support the development

Crypto? Sure.

We accept BTC and USDC at company addresses. Legally, it's the same R&D support for HERD Pte. Ltd. — not an anonymous donation: above the equivalent of $1,000, we'll ask you to contact us and pass a simple verification. The addresses and every incoming transaction are public — see for yourself.

BTCbc1qzptceespl4a9qdtyezuqc9nqqzy8g5rehwz9v0

USDC · ERC-200x0Ed68B14cCD01437A91766dE219f6A774B4A5aA2

Honest questions

The things you were going to ask anyway.

Is it safe to pay for something that doesn't exist yet?

That's exactly why we made the deposit refundable. Your $25 sits there, reserved for you, until you confirm shipment. Decide to walk away — the money goes back to the same card. We're here to earn trust, not to collect cash.

When will I get my sensor?

We're aiming for the second half of 2026 for the first batch. We're building the station and running the tests in the open: every step goes into the project journal. If the timeline slips, you'll be the first to know — and your right to a refund isn't going anywhere.

Why does a company take the money, not the foundation?

Because The Ten Minutes Foundation is still being registered, and we refuse to lie about it. A pre-order is a commercial transaction with HERD Pte. Ltd. Once the Foundation is registered, $6 from every sensor sold will flow into it — exactly as promised in our open economics, and you'll be able to verify it in the reports. A team with a background in audit and AML understands the value of clean money better than most.

Will the sensor definitely warn me about a tsunami?

No — and don't believe anyone who promises that. HERD is a research network, not a certified alarm. Your sensor is one node in an experiment that may one day give coastlines precious minutes. It does not replace official warning channels.

How much internet will the sensor use?

About 30–80 MB per month — a couple of minutes of YouTube. Infrasound isn't audio: 25 pressure readings per second are enough, and they compress beautifully. On metered connections an eco mode (~5 MB/month) sends summaries only, with raw data on request from the network. If your Wi-Fi drops, the sensor buffers up to 72 hours and re-sends. We publish the full engineering openly on the device page.