Hylio startup

Arthur Erickson is co-founder of Hylio Agro Drones, a company that develops and manufactures agri drones in the U.S. He and his co-founders came up with their idea of what drone technology should be in college. Seven years ago, the company started I started the company with a few of my now co-founders who at the time were my roommates. We were going to the University of Texas at Austin, so I was starting aerospace engineering. My CTO was starting electrical engineering and computer science. Our CFO now was was a business student, but we're all sitting around one day in our dorm room looking at an article online about how Amazon and Google were doing drone delivery. And it just clicked. We said, if these big players are doing it, this technology is very exciting, it's very accessible. It has a lot of power and potential to it. So right then and there, being young and having nothing to lose and having the skill sets and the optimism, we decided, hey, we're going to start a drone company. At first actually we didn't just do AG solely. We focused on a number of different industries just trying to see what was the best product market fit. So we made an all purpose mid to heavy lift drone system by ourselves. So we did the hardware, the software, we had a minimally viable product that we went to the market with and we tried some defense applications, some drone delivery applications, but also AG all the while. So for about a year or two we were just exploring these different options. But by 2017 it was pretty clear that agriculture was the best fit for us. We liked it the most. We got the best product market fit there, so that's what we solely devoted ourselves to. At that point. Speaker1: A business started not in a garage, but in a dorm room.