Gander Robotics Gains Pre-Seed Funding for Autonomous Search and Rescue Robots (Autery '15)
Gander Robotics, a defense and dual-use robotics company developing autonomous rescue systems for maritime operations, has closed a $1.1 million pre-seed funding round.
The company traces its origins to MIT Sloan, where Founder Michael Autery's deep domain expertise and 15 years of Naval experience and Co-Founder Lael Ayala's robotics expertise quickly attracted the attention of his investors, advisors, and defense stakeholders.
In the U.S. Navy, the survival rate for personnel who fall overboard is just 28 percent. In the cruise line industry, it drops to 17 percent. Current rescue protocols depend on human reaction time, visual searches, and manual deployment of rescue swimmers, a process measured in minutes or hours when every second counts.
Maguire is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds advanced degrees from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management and Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy. He served as a senior staff member on the Senate Intelligence Committee and as a U.S. Navy Intelligence Officer. He currently advises on the intersection of technology and policy as an Affiliate at the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) at Stanford University.
BZ '15!