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Vadym Melnyk Built a Drone That Knows When to Come Home
A teenage exchange year, an unfinished degree and one stubborn engineering question led from Ukraine to Poland to North Carolina. Along the way, Melnyk learned that the useful robot is the one that can finish the boring job without asking for applause.
Steve Zeets Measures the Ground From the Sky
A rodman learned to fly, an FAA webpage blinked, and an Iowa surveyor built a career around one stubborn question: can drone data be trusted on the ground?
Jackie Wu
Jackie Wu is the founder and CEO of Corvus Robotics, a company that builds fully autonomous drones that fly indoors and count warehouse inventory without beacons, GPS, Wi-Fi, or a human at the controls. A Northwestern-trained roboticist who spent time inside warehouses on four continents, he grew tired of watching people climb ladders with clipboards and barcode guns, and decided to teach a drone to do it instead. Corvus designs and manufactures its drones in California, went through Y Combinator, and raised a Series A in 2024 to push warehouses toward a lights-out future.
Mark Strauss
Mark Strauss is the co-founder and CEO of WaveAerospace, a Stratford, Connecticut drone manufacturer building unmanned aircraft engineered to fly in the wind, rain and snow that ground everyone else. A Yale chemistry graduate, airplane racer and pilot who flew before he could legally drive, Strauss teamed with aerospace engineer Steve Bofill to design a new class of all-weather UAS - from the wind-beating Falcon II to the 300-mph Huntress turbojet - sold to police, emergency services, militaries and foreign governments including Ecuador. The company closed an oversubscribed Series A in 2023 at a $40 million pre-money valuation.
Kyle Moore
Kyle Moore is co-founder and Software Fellow at Pyka, the Alameda, California company building the world's largest commercially-approved autonomous electric aircraft. A self-taught programmer who started writing code at age 11 from rural Washington, Moore brought firmware and robotics expertise from Google X to help design Pyka's Pelican — a 1,320-lb autonomous electric aircraft now spraying crops across four continents and delivering cargo for the U.S. Air Force. Pyka has raised $95M in total funding and achieved back-to-back FAA authorizations for the largest uncrewed aircraft systems in U.S. commercial history.
Michael Norcia
Michael Norcia is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pyka, the world's first FAA-certified autonomous electric aviation company. Based in Alameda, California, Pyka builds large-scale autonomous electric aircraft for agricultural crop protection and cargo logistics. Norcia — a UC Davis applied physics grad who cut his teeth engineering firmware and power systems at Zee Aero, Joby Aviation, and Kittyhawk — founded Pyka in 2017 (Y Combinator S17) with a pragmatic thesis: skip the flying cars, solve the problems aviation already has. Today Pyka's Pelican aircraft spray hundreds of acres per hour across the US, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Brazil, and the company is expanding into defense with a new platform called DropShip.