Francisco Aguilar

Picture the worst moment of a SWAT officer's day. A door. No idea what's behind it. The old answer was a fiber-optic snake on a pole, expensive, fragile, and slow to feed under the gap. Francisco Aguilar's answer is simpler and a little absurd: a softball wrapped in thick rubber. You throw it. It bounces, settles, and starts firing photos from six lenses a few times a second, stitching them into a full panorama on a phone in your hand. The camera is its own Wi-Fi hotspot, so there's no cable, no signal to beg for.

That product is the Explorer, and the company is Bounce Imaging. Aguilar is its founder and CEO. The pitch fits on an index card: see inside danger before you step into it. The execution took years, roughly twenty rounds of prototypes, and a lot of cops telling him to make it less clever.

The origin The idea was born in failure that wasn't his. In 2010, a magnitude-7 earthquake flattened much of Port-au-Prince. Aguilar, then a graduate student straddling MIT's Sloan School and Harvard's Kennedy School, watched international rescue teams struggle to find people buried in the rubble. Their cameras were costly and awkward to maneuver. Survivors had hours; the gear had limits. He started sketching something a rescuer could simply throw into a void and trust.

The build Bounce Imaging launched in 2012 with help from MIT's Venture Mentoring Service. Aguilar didn't go it alone. David Young, a fellow MIT MBA from the class of 2012 and a U.S. Army veteran, came on early to keep the design honest, to make sure the thing solved a real operator's problem rather than an engineer's idea of one. They tested with New England police departments, who were blunt. Aguilar's team kept adding features; the officers kept stripping them away. As he put it, "they just wanted a picture." So the team simplified, again and again, until the camera did one thing brilliantly instead of ten things adequately.

The proof Validation arrived in two flavors. There were the trophies: a $50,000 grand prize at the 2012 MassChallenge, a win at the 2013 MIT IDEAS Global Challenge, and a spot on TIME's Best Inventions of 2012. Aguilar was even interviewed live from the White House during a Demo Day. But the validation he talks about is quieter and harder to frame. First responders, he says, "go from saying 'cool concept' to using our system and saying 'Wow... this will save lives.'" That sentence is the whole company in miniature.

Buffalo In 2016, Bounce Imaging took a top prize at the 43North startup competition and moved to Buffalo, New York. Aguilar liked the city's manufacturing bones and the way its first-responder community embraced the product. The cameras get built in Haverhill, Massachusetts, about half an hour north of MIT, the kind of detail that tells you he never fully left the lab that raised the idea.

The next act By 2024 the company had a new flagship: the Pit Viper 360, a throwable camera with thermal panoramic vision, rugged enough for fire and rescue, collapsed structures, and jungle warfare. It can give special operators a read on a space without revealing their position. Aguilar launched it in September; by November it had landed on TIME's 200 Best Inventions of 2024, making him a two-time honoree twelve years apart. The customer list grew with it: U.S. Special Operations Command, a NATO ally, and the early backing of In-Q-Tel to bridge pilots into real deployment.

Through all of it, Aguilar keeps crediting the people more than the patents. He describes his engineers as the kind who "could be working for twice the pay and half the work, but want to make a difference." It's a strange luxury for a hardware founder, a team that stays for the mission. Then again, the mission is unusually legible: every camera sold is a person who didn't have to walk in blind.