SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TurbineOne, the frontline perception company, dedicated to empowering first responders and warfighters with the world’s best technology, today announced that it has raised $3 million in seed funding from XYZ Venture Capital. The company will use the funds to expand its engineering team and accelerate product delivery of its Frontline Perception System, which is designed to help people navigate dangerous environments by providing them with wearable AI and unprecedented situational awareness.
With the funding close, TurbineOne added a new board member, Marina Nitze, formerly the Chief Technology Officer at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Nitze was also part of the original class of Presidential Innovation Fellows and the US Digital Services team. She is recognized as a national leader in government technology, and her expertise and insights will be highly beneficial to TurbineOne as the company expands its reach within the Department of Defense; TurbineOne currently works with the U.S. Navy and Air Force.
Introducing the Frontline Perception System for Public Sector Heroes
TurbineOne’s Frontline Perception System breaks down data silos and delivers necessary intelligence directly to the tactical edge. As such, it is able to provide unparalleled insights to first responders and warfighters on the ground without overwhelming them with data or relying on poor internet connections. Through machine learning on edge hardware-- systems without an internet connection-- the Frontline Perception System helps people serving in dangerous environments to find what they are looking for, know where their teammates are physically located, and receive smart-alerts for unseen dangers in order to increase mission safety and success.
Today, TurbineOne announced a significant product development. Through a new project with Siemens Government Technologies, TurbineOne will power autonomous robots that will geolocate Foreign Object Debris (FOD) on military airfields, starting with a new Department of Defense prototyping contract at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Therefore, TurbineOne’s product formerly known as the “On-Body Operating System” will become the “Frontline Perception System” as it expands beyond body-worn systems to include robots and drones.
“Foreign Object Debris (FOD) creates a dangerous and expensive risk with the potential to cause catastrophic failure to turbine engines and other critical aircraft systems,” said Glenn Rosen, Digital Solutions Business Developer at Siemens Government Technologies, Inc. “The combination of TurbineOne’s FOD Dogs and Siemens’ Intosite™ software will increase safety for pilots and maintainers. This combined solution will also result in huge cost savings by preventing damage to expensive equipment and by eliminating countless man-hours looking for FOD on tarmacs, taxiways and runways.”
The TurbineOne Difference
Recent innovation in defense technology has focused largely on expensive cloud deployments for Generals and Admirals looking at massive dashboards in windowless rooms. TurbineOne, by contrast, takes a fundamentally different approach by concentrating on the other end of the operational spectrum-- the people on the ground. TurbineOne delivers essential intelligence directly to the people serving on our nation’s frontlines.
“We see TurbineOne as solving a fundamental issue of national security,” explained Ian Kalin, TurbineOne’s CEO and co-founder. “We can empower a digitally native generation with the mobile tools they expect but that today’s DOD is simply not providing. When I served in the military, I spent far too much time trying to find dangerous things with outdated tools and I wish I had TurbineOne’s products back then. People serving our nation today deserve the best technology that the American commercial sector can offer and I’m excited by how TurbineOne is helping to bridge this gap.”
Algorithm builders seeking to join TurbineOne’s platform have the technical and commercial ability to do so. Similar to how Apple’s App Store marketplace securely delivers third-party apps to iPhones, TurbineOne deploys the best computer vision and perception models to its customers on the Frontline Perception System. TurbineOne is also committed to partner integration, working with companies like Google and FEDDATA.
The Right Team for the Job
TurbineOne was started by Ian Kalin and Matt Amacker as a project incubated by Sweat Equity Ventures. Kalin previously served in the U.S. Navy as a Counter Terrorism Officer after witnessing the Pentagon attacked on September 11th and he later served as the first Chief Data Officer for the U.S. Department of Commerce.
Amacker has been awarded over 110 patents and was the former Head of Applied R&D at Google. He was also a Principal Engineer at Amazon and the Head of Car AI for the Toyota Research Institute. Together, Amacker and Kalin realized that people serving in dangerous frontline environments do not have Machine Learning (ML) capabilities, so they founded TurbineOne to address the national security challenge.
“TurbineOne’s team is passionate about improving government technology in an effort to protect those on the frontlines as well as the nation as a whole,” said Ross Fubini, Managing Partner of XYZ Venture Capital and seed investor in Anduril. “They are also unique in the startup ecosystem with their market insights and technical capabilities to deliver Applied ML at the internet-disconnected edge. An edge-deployable operating system has a massive addressable market when considering all the sensor data, like video feeds, that would benefit from having ML-generated insights. TurbineOne is uniquely positioned to capture that opportunity.”
About TurbineOne
TurbineOne was created to help public sector heroes perform even more effectively with the right technologies. We leverage Machine Learning to provide frontline perception that empowers first-responders and warfighters with greater situational awareness. TurbineOne currently works with the Department of Defense as well as leading commercial customers like Siemens. The company is based in San Francisco. Please visit us at https://www.turbineone.com for more information.
About XYZ Venture Capital
Operating under the belief that execution solves all problems, XYZ is a venture firm that invests in early-stage founders to help them go faster. XYZ aims to support entrepreneurs in building enduring companies in fintech, enterprise and tech-forgotten industries like insurance and the public sector. The firm primarily backs talented founders at the earliest stages of company building – people who have discovered a key insight and have an unfair advantage from “doing the work” or based on their own lived experience. Follow XYZ at www.xyz.vc.
About Siemens Government Technologies:
Siemens Government Technologies is the wholly-owned, cleared U.S. subsidiary of Siemens Corporation whose mission it is to secure and modernize the largest infrastructure in the world, the U.S. Federal Government. It does so by being the leading integrator of Siemens’ innovative products, technologies, software and services in the areas of digital engineering and modeling, efficient and resilient energy solutions, and smart infrastructure modernization. A list of relevant Siemens trademarks can be found here. Other trademarks belong to their respective owners.
