Vermeer started with drone cinematography services and worked on productions for HBO, Netflix, and Steven Spielberg. While the original business of drone cinematography was fascinating, it was difficult, Brian says. The startup was a services firm, meaning it was hard to scale, and the very nature of film production resulted in a significant amount of back and forth to pinpoint how each client saw their world. As such, collaboration was often time-consuming and sometimes required reshoots.
A turning point for the startup came at a chance meeting with Warren Katz. In 2019, Brian found himself in Buffalo, N.Y., sitting next to Warren, Managing Director of the Air Force Accelerator Powered by Techstars, who was immediately impressed by Vermeer. He suggested the startup apply for the accelerator despite submissions closing “in the next two hours”. Vermeer was accepted and immediately relocated to Boston.
The program focuses on the next generation of technologies for any and all uses of interest to the U.S. Air Force. The experience was transformative, Brian says, as the startup could now show its abilities to industries other than film.
“When I showed people in the Department of Defense (DoD) the tech, I could see it really resonating, as they saw it solving a lot of their problems,” he says. “It was really eye-opening, to be honest with you. It opened up a new world for us with the Department of Defence. Literally, within two or three months of efforts, we won several millions of dollars of DoD contracts.”
The challenge now was to develop the supporting technology for the newly generated opportunity, pivoting from drone cinematography to advanced military technology.
Vermeer’s challenge was unique in the sense that we were required to develop the technology alongside them from “green-field” research to productization. The whole concept of what we were trying to achieve was bold and the mission was clear: Develop worldwide localization capabilities.
The dTLabs Team took an iterative approach, focused on validating the riskier points of the technology in the first weeks of development. Using already available drone footage, we developed an offline localization service with state-of-the-art models, adapted from Open Source foundations and published academic papers.
From that point onwards, we worked tirelessly with the Vermeer team to mature the technology towards productization. Together, we created and validated a hardware design with custom sensor boards, set up flight test routines, and perfected the software to an unprecedented level of accuracy and reliability. We supported customer demonstrations and partner integrations to several use cases in different sensor platforms, aircraft, and environments.
Today Vermeer’s technology is operating worldwide, with units deployed in its own hardware and in partner’s platforms. dtLabs’s partnership with Vermeer grows stronger every quarter, with new projects and products.
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