The Sentient Blue Technologies team is all smiles after winning the $1 million grand prize in the GENIUS NY start-up competition for unmanned technology firms.
Sentient Blue Technologies, a team from Parma, Italy, won the $1 million grand prize in the GENIUS NY start-up competition for unmanned technology firms. The other four finalist firms each received an investment of $500,000 during the April 9 final event in Syracuse, New York.
“The GENIUS NY competition is transforming the economic landscape of Central New York by attracting the next generation of innovative entrepreneurs,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said. “By investing in the unmanned aerial system businesses, we are ensuring that New York continues to establish itself as the leader in this burgeoning industry that is bringing jobs and economic growth to the Central New York region.”
Sentient Blue is developing efficient, more environmentally friendly micro gas turbine-based power plants for use in unmanned aerial vehicles to increase flight endurance.
The GENIUS NY program is a business accelerator that offers selected teams expert advice and other resources including office space, company stipends, training and networking introductions. The yearlong program is focused on companies working on unmanned systems including hardware, software, data analytics and the internet of things. GENIUS NY is one of the largest competitions of its kind in the world.
The other finalists were:
CivDrone (Israel) which is developing fast, reliable and autonomous marking solutions on enterprise drones for the construction industry.
Digitalizing and automating land surveying services, they say, will increase productivity and shorten time of construction while lowering its costs.
EagleHawk (Buffalo, N.Y.) which provides a preventative maintenance platform for commercial buildings with flat roofs. EagleHawk leverages drones equipped with infrared sensors to detect roof leaks that are not evident to the naked eye.
ResilienX (Syracuse, N.Y.) which will be developing software to increase the resilience of, and reduce the maintenance costs for, the emerging Unmanned Traffic Management (UTM) system. This software will monitor the health and integrity of a system and facilitate fault recovery if a problem is encountered.
Vermeer (Brooklyn, N.Y.) which is an augmented reality drone solution that enables anyone to capture aerial photos, videos, and data. A user can design their aerial shot in an augmented reality environment and then send it to a drone to execute autonomously in the real world.
