Aeryon Labs Inc.
Waterloo company flies to new heights
When Dave Kroestch was in high school, he and a friend entered an aerial robotics competition. His hobby soon became his passion — Kroestch continued building and testing different aerial robotic systems as part of a group while at the University of Waterloo. As graduation approached, Kroestch began thinking about making his passion a career.
Kroestch and group member Mike Peasgood decided to take the technology they were working on at the time — a camera attached to a tiny helicopter — and perfect it, then commercialize it.
They gathered funding from friends, family and savings accounts and called their company Aeryon Labs Inc. They began asking potential customers, like police forces, what applications Scout, their helicopter camera, could have. They also reached out to Communitech and the Ontario Centres of Excellence (OCE) — both part of the Ontario Network of Excellence (ONE) — for advice.
Aeryon Labs received several rounds of funding through provincial government commercialization programs to help get the company up and running. But the biggest help they received, says Kroetsch, was from the connections provided by OCE and Communitech — connections to researchers, entrepreneurs, mentors and investors.
“Our experience with [them] was invaluable. They came through when we needed them most,” says Kroetsch.
As former University of Waterloo students, the company’s founders also reached out to the institution for help with R&D. In fact, the first stabilized camera mounted to the Scout was actually developed at the university by a student who was working with Aeryon as part of an OCE-funded program.
Aeryon started to grow incrementally as interest in the Scout took off.
“The Scout is targeted at the backpack of every soldier and the trunk of every police car, but the number of uses is really endless,” said Kroetsch.
Police departments and emergency responders have been the first to realize the potential of the Scout — buying them for use in everything from hostage takings to crime scene investigations, border patrol and search and rescue missions. In fact, one law enforcement organization successfully used the Scout to plan a raid on a South American drug lord.
The technology is also popular in military circles. Scouts can keep a lookout around a camp perimeter, fly reconnaissance missions, detect bombs or even help survey disaster damage.
Many other civilian applications are possible, such as inspecting archaeological sites, taking air and smokestack samples, monitoring volume and hotspots in landfill sites, detecting methane leaks, finding pipeline leaks and monitoring oil spills. In fact, BP purchased the Scout to help monitor its recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Aeryon Labs currently employees about 20 people and builds several Scout units each week. Kroetsch says he is in the process of hiring more staff and hopes to see the company grow to about 50 or 70 employees over the next three years.
And with countless potential uses for the Scout, the sky is the limit.
Scout Quick Facts
- It snaps together like Lego
- Can be assembled in less than a minute
- Weighs just over a kilogram
- Comes in a briefcase that would qualify as carry-on baggage
- Practically flies itself using GPS programming
- Can fly in high winds and inclement weather, and
- Can send its data to a command centre or straight to a smart phone.
Edited from the original version found here: http://www.mri.gov.on.ca/english/ontario_innovates/aeryon.asp
