Our Story

From autonomous drones to fire prevention

AVIAN was born at the intersection of cutting-edge robotics research and a real industrial problem — and it started with drones racing at the University of Zurich.

In 2021, Drew Hanover and Thomas Laengle were working together at the University of Zurich on one of the most ambitious challenges in robotics: autonomous drone racing. Drew completed his master's thesis on a novel combination of adaptive control and model predictive control — enabling drones to fly at extraordinary speeds under massive uncertainties like aerodynamic disturbance and model mismatch.

Drew was invited to return for his PhD, where he continued pushing boundaries — working on multi-agent control, getting multiple drones to race competitively against one another in collaboration with Google DeepMind.

News broke that autonomous drones had beaten the best human first-person-view pilots in the world — the first time in history a robot surpassed a human at a physical sport. The story spread globally.

Among those who took notice was Ernest Schilliger, CEO of Schilliger Holz — one of the largest wood producers in Switzerland. Seeing something deeper in the technology than sports headlines, he reached out to Drew directly.

Curious, Drew traveled to meet Ernest at the Schilliger Holz facility in Kuessnacht, Switzerland. Ernest shared a problem that had haunted him for years: the ever-present risk of fire in a sawmill. In 2017, Schilliger Holz had suffered a massive fire — devastating to the company, the community, and the people who worked there.

Drew returned to Thomas and they began asking a more fundamental question: could the perception and intelligence they had built for racing drones be used to detect fire risks before fires ever start?

Drew and Thomas spoke with mill owners across the DACH region, conducting deep research into industrial fire risk and building relationships with the people who faced it daily. The problem was real, urgent, and largely unsolved by existing technology.

Drew left his PhD to found AVIAN in September 2023. Since then, AVIAN has assembled a world-class team of computer vision engineers and researchers who are obsessed with one mission: stopping fires before they start.

Leveraging state-of-the-art machine learning, data science, and an obsessive focus on usability, AVIAN has built a world-class system now deployed in 50+ facilities globally.

AVIAN owns the entire vertical — manufacturing the cameras, writing all the software, planning installations, administering support, and running analytics on customer data to ensure maintenance issues are addressed early. Every layer of the stack, built and owned by the same team with the same standards.