A Fire Sprinkler Design App, Built for the Industry

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FireSprinkPro is entering the market with a simple premise: the tools fire sprinkler designers and drafts people use every day should be built by people who have actually done the work.

 

Who we are

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It started on a site visit in December 2025. Michael Fritz was on a scaffold measuring up a job to take back to the office when a simple, familiar frustration hit him: why isn't there an app that does this on site? Why are sprinkler designers still bridging the gap between the field and the desk by hand?

 

Michael isn't the type to leave a good question unanswered. With a wide technical background and decades of hands-on experience in the fire safety industry, he decided to have a go at solving it himself. What began as a rough idea quickly became a real design — and it wasn't long before he realised this wasn't just an on-site tool, it was a mobile one, built to live in the hand, doing the work rather than on a desk somewhere else.

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From there, he brought in the people he trusted most to help build it out — family, quite literally — pulling together the different talents needed to turn the idea into something real: Chris Sagadevan on the technical and product side, and Helen Sagadevan on marketing and operations.

 

On 17 June 2026, FireSprinkPro went live on the Google Play Store. Weeks later, Michael packed Chris off to Las Vegas for the NFPA Conference & Expo, carrying the same idea that started it all on a job site six months earlier.

We're a small team spread across two continents — Michael in South Africa, Chris and Helen in Australia — brought together by one idea. And in South Africa, as in most of the world, fire safety isn't an optional extra. For the love of fire safety is what sits underneath everything we build: not just an app, but an intelligent solution built by someone who has actually stood in the field asking the question our users ask every day — isn't there an easier way to do this?

 

The concept

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FireSprinkPro is a mobile app built specifically for fire sprinkler designers and drafts people — a hydraulic calculator that puts accurate, code-compliant calculations directly in the hands of the people doing the design work, wherever they're working. It's built around NFPA 13¹ in the United States and SANS 10287² in South Africa, with the standards knowledge embedded directly into the tool rather than left for the user to cross-reference elsewhere.

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Much of the existing software in this space was built around heavy processing power — impressive 3D visuals that come at a cost, chaining the work to a desk where the license sits. Annual license fees mean businesses think twice about who gets access, so it's usually one "specialist" running the software — often not even the person who went out and measured the site. And once a proposal is set in motion, making a change to it can become a task in itself.

 

FireSprinkPro is built the other way around: mobile-first, lightweight, and designed by someone who has sat in the designer's chair.

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It also means the person in the field can download and send what they've got, right then and there. If the specialist is still back in the office, that brings the field work to their desktop instantly — and we know the office still wants to see "what we've got so far." That's a bridge FireSprinkPro builds that's never really existed before. Or were you doing that over a FaceTime call, trying to get a visual across down a phone line?

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The market opportunity

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Fire protection in the US alone is a $22 billion-a-year³ industry, spread across nearly 20,000 businesses⁴ — and that's before you count Australia, the UK, Europe, and the Gulf. It's an industry that never shrinks, because the need behind it never goes away: buildings keep going up, codes keep getting stricter, and somewhere at the bottom of every one of those nearly 20,000 (US alone) businesses is a person with a laser distance measurer and a set of calculations standing between a building and a fire.

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And this industry has real range to it. Johnson Controls and Cintas are named, alongside Honeywell, Siemens, and Pye-Barker Fire & Safety, among the five largest players in the US fire protection and security installation market — a group that together accounts for roughly a fifth⁵ of the industry. Pye-Barker, which describes itself⁶ as the largest fully integrated fire protection and life safety provider in the country, operates more than 250 locations across 45 states with close to 8,000 team members, and has reportedly been valued by its private equity investors at more than $6 billion⁷ — a sign of just how far a fire protection business can grow.

 

And whether it's a business at that scale or a two-person outfit just getting started, every one of them runs on the same thing at ground level: someone has to design the system, and someone has to run the numbers.

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That's the room FireSprinkPro is stepping into. This is an industry built on the same instinct that drives any company worth working with — always looking for the next best way to do things better. If the NFPA Conference & Expo 2026 has proven anything at all is that Fire Protection has gone the next level. Innovation in the industry is cutting edge.

 

Michael has worked with nearly every hydraulic calculation and design product this industry has produced, and knows firsthand how much room there is for something built purpose-first, mobile-first, for the person actually doing the design work.

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FireSprinkPro exists for an industry of thousands of companies who all want the same thing: to get it right the first time, every time. We're happy to have a seat at that table: a real solution to a real-world problem.

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What designers and drafts people can expect

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For the end user, FireSprinkPro means fewer steps between a design problem and a compliant answer.

 

Expect:

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• Fast, accurate hydraulic calculations built to NFPA 13 and SANS 10287

• A mobile-first tool designed for use in the field, not just at a desk

• A platform built by someone who has done this work for decades, not a generic engineering tool retrofitted for fire protection

• A product still early in its journey — which means the people using it now are shaping where it goes next

 

 

What's next for us?

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This is early days for us, and we're moving fast. If you're a fire sprinkler designer, draftsperson, or firm and want to see what FireSprinkPro can do, get in touch — we'd love to show you.

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References

1. NFPA 13, Standard for the Installation of Sprinkler Systems — National Fire Protection Association — https://www.nfpa.org/product/nfpa-13-standard-for-the-installation-of-sprinkler-systems/p0013code

2. SANS 10287, Automatic Sprinkler Installations for Fire-Fighting Purposes — South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) — https://store.sabs.co.za/sans-10287-2000-ed-1-00-219651.html

3. US fire protection and security system installation contractors industry size ($22.1bn, 2026) — IBISWorld — https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/fire-protection-and-security-system-installation-contractors/6486/

4. Number of US fire protection and security system installation contractor businesses (19,845, 2026) — IBISWorld — https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry/fire-protection-and-security-system-installation-contractors/6486/

5. Top-5 combined market share for US fire protection and security installation contractors (Honeywell, Siemens, Johnson Controls, Cintas, Pye-Barker) — Continuous Acquisitions, "Private Equity Fire & Life Safety (2026): The Consolidation Map" — https://ctacquisitions.com/guides/private-equity-fire-life-safety-2026/

6. Pye-Barker Fire & Safety's self-description as the largest fully integrated fire protection, life safety, and security services provider in the US — Pye-Barker Fire & Safety press release, January 2025 — https://pyebarkerfs.com/news/pye-barker-fire-safety-secures-additional-private-capital-to-invest-in-its-team-customer-care-and-geographic-expansion/

7. Pye-Barker Fire & Safety's reported valuation (17–20x EBITDA, $6bn+) — SDM Magazine, "Pye-Barker Could Be Eyeing $6B Market Listing This Year, Report Says" — https://www.sdmmag.com/articles/103337-pye-barker-could-be-eyeing-6b-market-listing-this-year-report-says