Brian Streem bought a large Swedish drone because he thought his friends in Hollywood might want to rent it. It was 2013. He had gone to film school, produced independent movies and commercials, and seen a video that made putting a camera in the air look irresistible. In his later telling, the expensive machine crashed within roughly a week. An insurance payment financed its replacement. The opening scene of his drone career had already acquired a producer's least favorite feature: an unexpected expense.
More than a decade later, Streem was onstage describing a company with customers in the American military and an operation in Ukraine. Vermeer, where he is co-founder and CEO, develops visual navigation for drones operating without GPS. There is a recognizable thread between those two businesses. Both begin with a camera and a problem of movement. Everything surrounding the camera has changed.
His path is easier to understand if you start with what interested him before defense became the business: the image. Aircraft were a means of getting a camera somewhere useful. Eventually, the information inside that image became useful for getting the aircraft somewhere, too.
A film degree, then a flying camera
Streem grew up in New York City and graduated from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts in 2010. Film production was the starting point. His early work included commercials and independent films, with one production reaching Sundance. The attraction of drones was the freedom they offered a filmmaker: a camera could move through space without requiring the usual arrangement of cranes, tracks or helicopters.
He recruited Jeff Brink, a former NYU classmate, to help turn that attraction into a business. Their Swedish aircraft cost $70,000 and weighed 55 pounds. Those numbers give the early venture some useful perspective. This was a serious piece of equipment to buy with savings, especially when the market for its services still needed explaining.
The company known as AeroCine and then Aerobo took shape during the early commercial-drone years. By May 2014, Streem and his partners were offering aerial cinematography with a three-person traveling crew: pilot, camera operator and aircraft technician. Moving the camera was only part of the job. Moving the equipment across borders required paperwork of its own.
That practical detail suits the business better than the usual image of someone casually launching a drone from a field. The product might be a few seconds of graceful footage. Behind it stood people, transport, preparation and expensive machinery. The sky was spacious; the production budget still had edges.
Hollywood buys the picture
Aerobo's work reached films, television and music videos. Its customers included Netflix, Amazon, Fox and ESPN. The appeal was straightforward: production companies could hire the aircraft and the crew together, then concentrate on the shot. Streem sold an outcome that directors understood, with the technical operation bundled underneath.
By 2017, he was an Inc. 30 Under 30 honoree. Aerobo had also built a presence in Los Angeles alongside its Brooklyn base. For someone who had begun in movies, these were recognizable signs of progress. He had found a business inside a craft he cared about.
There was a regulatory story running alongside the creative one. On July 15, 2015, Streem appeared before the House Committee on Small Business at a hearing about unmanned aircraft. His written testimony introduced him as an artist and NYU film graduate building drones. He was explaining a new commercial activity to lawmakers while still working out how to make that activity pay.
The contrast is revealing. The same founder had to persuade a director that an aerial shot was possible and persuade institutions that commercial drone operations deserved room to develop. The equipment crossed professional boundaries long before Vermeer crossed into defense.
“I didn’t necessarily choose the drone thing. It chose me.”
Brian Streem, 2017
The shot that existed only in a director's head
Success in services brought its own frustrations. A director could imagine a camera move that was difficult to describe to a sales team, an operations team, a pilot and a camera operator. Each conversation introduced another chance for the imagined shot to change before the aircraft left the ground.
Streem later described trying Microsoft's HoloLens and seeing a way to make that invisible intention visible. Augmented reality could help someone design a flight and examine the camera's view before carrying it out. He committed to moving away from services toward software, despite the revenue the existing business generated.
Vermeer emerged in 2018. By March 2020, its proposition included an app through which customers could compose virtual aerial shots and order footage from drone operators. The idea preserved a filmmaker's priorities. Start with what the customer wants to see, then arrange the flight around that request.
There is a small, pleasing detail in that earlier incarnation. Asked for startup advice he wished he had received, Streem answered, “Listen to fewer people.” Asked about his favorite New York restaurant, he named Golden Diner. Even a company built around aerial imagery remained attached to the ground at lunchtime.
A film-school graduate starts calling the military
In January 2020, Vermeer announced its place in the Air Force Accelerator Powered by Techstars. Warren Katz, who ran the program and later became a Vermeer adviser, helped connect Streem's work with a different set of potential customers. Streem entered a professional world whose ranks, language and purchasing habits were unfamiliar.
His account of learning that world is unusually concrete. He asked people what they did, asked them to explain unfamiliar terms, and asked about their problems. He used demonstration videos, drawing on the skills he already had. A founder selling visual technology had some advantage in knowing how to make it visible.
He also kept a spreadsheet. Features occupied columns; customer requests accumulated marks. Navigation without GPS drew repeated interest. Something that had been a feature inside his imagined product began to look like the product customers actually needed.
Streem later put the outreach at roughly 50,000 cold emails and 2,000 conversations. Those are his own retrospective estimates. The useful part of the story is what the conversations changed: he arrived with one presentation of his technology and learned to organize the company around a problem the buyers kept naming.
When the image becomes an address
Vermeer's present work rests on a different use for a camera. A filmmaking camera records a scene for an audience. A visual positioning system compares what its cameras see with map information to determine location. The picture becomes an input to navigation.
GPS supplies location through satellite signals. Jamming and spoofing make reliance on those signals a vulnerability. Vermeer's approach gives aircraft another way to work out where they are. Its current product lineup includes Air, Celestial and Terminal Guidance, reflecting a broader navigation business than the early shot-planning app.
Draper Associates describes a system using electro-optical and infrared cameras, map data and Nvidia processors. That description also helps explain Streem's role. He leads a company of specialists. Vermeer's team includes CTO Suresh Kumar, robotics software leadership, research staff and test pilots. The founder's camera experience supplies a through line, while engineering and testing turn the idea into equipment other organizations can integrate.
The two-week trip that grew longer
Before relocating to Kyiv, Streem tried reaching Ukrainian contacts from his apartment in Queens. He expected demand for the technology to produce replies. It did not work that neatly. In his December 2024 account, a customer demonstration and an integration opportunity finally helped get him into Ukraine.
He expected a short visit, perhaps two weeks. The expectation sounds almost comic beside the work that followed: introductions, integrations, questions of trust and the slow process of understanding what manufacturers and operators actually required. His own verdict on those initial assumptions was brief: “I had no clue.”
Streem reaches for cinema when explaining the experience. He compared it with Bridge of Spies, the Spielberg film about negotiation across unfamiliar institutions. It is an apt choice for someone whose story is so full of conversations. The work depended on interpreting people as well as interpreting images.
Living closer to users changed the questions he could ask and the feedback his team could obtain. A demonstration establishes that something can work in a particular setting. Integration requires it to cooperate with someone else's aircraft, software and operating routine. That distinction occupies much of the distance between an interesting product and a useful one.
More customers, the same practical test
In October 2025, Vermeer's Series A reached $10 million, with Draper Associates leading the extension. Rockaway Ventures and Aero X Ventures were among its backers. The financing gave the company another kind of audience: investors assessing a business that had moved a long way from its original film customers.
By October 2026, Vermeer said it had more than 40 customers and 60 employees, including 10 in Ukraine. Streem also confirmed that the company was raising money again, without announcing the round's size or timetable. Those figures describe a company still building its organization around the demands it encountered.
The ambition has become more specific over time. An early desire to make aerial imagery easier to commission developed into software for planning movement, then into navigation technology for environments where a satellite signal cannot be assumed. Each change asked more of the camera.
Streem's first expensive aircraft offered an unhappy lesson in gravity. His later career has required a longer education in customers, institutions and the inconvenience of making hardware and software work together. Through it all, the film graduate has kept returning to the image. Once, he wanted to know what the camera could show. Now his company asks what the aircraft can learn from looking.