Mark Groden has always looked to the sky.
He grew up in the Midwest, and his family moved 13 times.
“That meant a large part of my childhood was sitting in the back seat of a car looking out the window, just very frustrated with the state of transportation,” said Groden, CEO and founder of SkyRyse. “I became really passionate in aerospace engineering when I was pretty young, so I recognize that aircraft could one day potentially provide a mode of transportation that would really revolutionize the way that we got around.”
He took his childhood dream to fly over traffic seriously. When he was 16, he invented a unmanned aerial vehicle for the Air Force, and then went on to get his Ph.D. in sensor data fusion from University of Michigan. Then in 2016, when he was 26, he founded SkyRyse. The company, which has been flying under the radar, is coming out of stealth mode on Tuesday.
Its mission is to “make air transportation accessible and safe for everyone as a new mode of transportation,” Groden said. “One day to replace terrestrial modes of transportation.”
The start-up, based near Silicon Valley in Hayward, California, has grown to a team of about 20 people who come from Space X, Boeing, Airbus and NASA.
Groden said the goal of the company is to build autonomous flying taxis that are similarly priced to Lyft, Uber or Didi.
“Somewhere in the span of a five to 10 years, it will be possible to request an aircraft that’s vertical takeoff and landing capable to a location not too far from your origin or destination,” he said.
The company is launching by building its technology into helicopters for testing and data collection. To start, it has a partnership with the city of Tracy, California. It added sensors, radar and cameras to make Tracy’s first responder helicopter safer and easier to fly in tough conditions like fog.
