By STU CLAMPITT
news@readthereporter.com
Fishers-based Pierce Aerospace was named the TechPoint Mira “Tech Innovation Team of the Year” at the 25th annual Mira Awards gala. The Reporter spoke with Fishers Mayor Scott Fadness and Pierce Aerospace Founder Aaron Pierce about the award, the company, and the city ecosystem that made it all possible.
Pierce Aerospace’s team received the Tech Innovation Team of the Year Award for designing and producing remote identification beacons for unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) that enable the aircraft to meet federal regulatory requirements. They also make remote identification receivers to monitor airspace – a technology that is making a national impact.
The company refers to this technology as “license plates for drones.”
Pierce
“We’ve been working on it for a while,” Pierce told The Reporter. “The concept is that just like license plates on cars or transponders and other aircraft, we need to have a means to figure out who’s flying that aircraft and where it’s at in space and time. And that satisfies both a security and a safety question, just like those other technologies do as well. We started working on this back in 2017 and have been pursuing that ever since.”
Pierce called his company’s journey in Fishers – from an idea to the tech innovation team of the year – as “a good, fun, wild ride.”
“It’s always fun and very rewarding to build something new,” Pierce said. “Our whole team is very entrepreneurial. It’s a small team, but it’s a team that’s also really stuck with it and persisted through the grit and the grind to take what was effectively a concept literally on the back of a napkin, and then move that all the way into something. The government took it and helped build it from a policy standpoint, which turned into a rule. And now we’re building products to help the market meet the requirements of that rule.”
Mayor Fadness told The Reporter he is proud of Pierce Aerospace, not only for the Mira Award itself, but also for building a successful company out of nothing more than an idea and a lot of determination.
Fadness
“Aaron over there at Pierce has been working on this for some time and continues to try to make big strides in an industry that can be pretty difficult to get into,” Fadness said. “It’s been fun to watch this company progress.”
Pierce called the Indiana IoT (Internet of Things) Lab in Fishers one of the best places in the state to do this kind of work and to grow a company.
“We’re surrounded by a community of like-minded entrepreneurs, highly technical people,” Pierce said. “It’s a place where we can tinker and break stuff. It’s an IoT lab, so it’s an inherently noisy environment. We were able, from day one, to build our technology in an incredibly spectrum-dirty environment, which helps us to really understand how to make sure that this technology would work in the real world.”
Pierce credits much of his company’s success to the entrepreneurial environment available in Fishers.
“The entire Fishers ecosystem is fundamentally built on collaborative entrepreneurship, which I think is an incredibly unique philosophy to build an entire city on,” Pierce said. “That’s one of those underlying, intangible secret weapon types of things that we utilize as a startup to be successful in our mission. We continue to look at it as a secret weapon to growth and how we attract people to the team, as we continue to bring aboard new people, and how we think about building a company that can make a global impact.”
According to Fadness, that environment exists by design.
“We’ve worked very hard and very intentionally to create an ecosystem that supports Fortune 100 companies all the way through to a backpack and an idea,” Fadness said. “That dynamic economic environment where commerce is happening either organically or when we’re recruiting companies to be a part of this ecosystem. It’s really, really important. We don’t take for granted and we try to celebrate to the best of our ability. The successes of all up and down that ecosystem – from the startup all the way through to the large corporation – if they have a success, we feel like that’s a success and it’s affirmative to the vision of our city. It is critically important. We may be in government, and we may have a different role, but I think we share a common spirit when it comes to being entrepreneurial.”
Learn more about Pierce Aerospace at pierceaerospace.net. For more information about the Indiana IoT Lab, go to indianaiot.com.