Pennovation Center Leases Inventor Garage to Aerial Applications
Drone software platform developer moves from coworking member to ‘inventor garage.’
Media Contact: Jennifer Rizzi, Director, Communications, Facilities & Real Estate Services, 215.573.6107, rizzi@upenn.edu
December 5, 2017
The University of Pennsylvania’s Division of Facilities and Real Estate Services announced today that Aerial Applications has signed a lease for an Inventor Garage within the Pennovation Center, the University’s business, technology and laboratory incubator that opened in fall 2016.
Aerial Applications has been a coworking member of the Pennovation Center for the last six months, and has now moved up into an Inventor Garage — one of five total contiguous Inventor Garages along the building’s eastern façade — evoking the beginning of some of the world’s most famous technology companies in garages. Each Garage provides start-ups with space for research, development and prototyping, and features roll-up doors facing outwards.
“This move of Aerial Applications from coworking desk member to an Inventor Garage in the Pennovation Center is an example of the way we want to see entrepreneurs progress. We imagine a facility where someone with a brilliant idea can start off at a coworking desk, grow into an office or a shared lab space, and then eventually grow out of the Pennovation Center and move into larger space still at Pennovation Works,” says Anne Papageorge, Vice President, Facilities & Real Estate Services at Penn. “Aerial Application’s growth is a model of our goal to support and nurture entrepreneurs at Pennovation Works.”
Aerial Applications is a software company that takes images from drones and turns them into maps and 3D models to make them more useful. Company founders Joe Sullivan (chief executive officer), Nathan Sullivan (chief technology officer), and Jeff Brooks (chief marketing officer) launched Aerial Applications in March 2016 in Philadelphia.
"We love working at the Pennovation Center. The location is a center of innovation within the drone industry and has provided invaluable access to countless business contacts,” says CEO Joe Sullivan. “We are able to attract top talent here and impress prospective customers."
Aerial Applications describes its work as bringing artificial intelligence to enterprise drone operations. Through their cloud-based SaaS platform, users can upload, process, store, and share drone imagery to create 2D and 3D digital models. Their technology recently provided wide-area damage assessment in the wake of Hurricane Irma, flying over 400 square miles in Florida to capture aerial imagery.
About The Pennovation Center
The Pennovation Center is a 58,000 square-foot three-story facility designed for start-up companies, entrepreneurs, and inventors looking to be part of a unique community of innovators, and includes a full service technology incubator; basic wet and dry laboratories; private offices, Inventor Garages, as well as a coworking space for up to 200 members, operated by Benjamin’s Desk. It opened in October 2016 as the centerpiece of the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennovation Works, a 23-acre development adjacent to the University campus on the southern bank of the Schuylkill River providing facilities and amenities to bridge intellectual and entrepreneurial initiatives among University researchers, private sector innovators, and start-ups. Owned by the University, and operated by its Division of Facilities and Real Estate Services, Pennovation Works houses research labs from Penn’s schools of Engineering and Applied Science, Veterinary Medicine, Dental Medicine, and Design, and companies such as Qualcomm Philadelphia Research Lab, Netronix, and Novapeutics.
Visit pennovation.upenn.edu and follow Pennovation Works on Facebook, @Pennovation on Twitter, and @pennovationworks on Instagram.
Learn more about Aerial Applications at their website and follow them on Twitter @Aerapps.
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