We Just Wrapped Our First Air Force Contract
& We’re Grateful for Every Bit of It
April 2025
Our AFWERX SBIR Phase I contract just came to a close, and we wanted to take a minute to be grateful for what the last few months gave us, because it gave us a lot.
We ran this alongside the NSF I-Corps program, at the same time, and that overlap turned out to be the best part. Over these few months we sat down for more than 35 structured interviews with an incredible range of people: commercial drone pilots, flight instructors, fire and police leadership, startup founders, and senior military leadership, including general officers in the Air Force and Space Force. Hearing the same core problem, fragmented command and control, too much operator workload, not enough real situational awareness, echoed back to us by people with completely different jobs was the moment this stopped feeling like our hypothesis and started feeling like something real.
On the contract itself, we got to work with two separate Technical Points of Contact and AFWERX fellows from both the Air Force and the Navy, which meant building with more than one branch’s needs in mind from day one. And just this week, we hit a milestone we’re genuinely proud of: we got the AI Co-Pilot running live enough to perform a virtual demonstration with an actual drone platform in the loop. Not a slide. A real system, responding to real inputs. Below is an image of that!
We’re grateful to AFWERX, to our TPOCs, and to every single person who gave us their time for an interview these past few months. This is exactly the kind of validation an early-stage company needs.