2015 MRSD alumnus Stephen Smith has recently been named the Chief Technology Office (CTO) of TerrAvion. TerrAvion is the largest volume subscription provider of aerial imagery in the US. They do 100 times more imagery than the entire electric drone industry and handle more data than the top 10 satellite imagery services combined. Subscription aerial imagery allows the grower to find and resolve discrepancies on their farm before it affects the bottom line. As the number of people per acre in agriculture declines at an ever-increasing rate, farmers need to adopt new technology to be able to manage their farms with fewer people.
TerrAvion’s founder and CEO, Robert Morris, led the Army’s first drone platoon in Afghanistan. The following three things convinced him to start a subscription aerial imagery business:
- First, imagery is really, really powerful for people doing operations outdoors. It changes the way organizations work and allows leaders to make their teams much more effective.
- Second, anyone who can make use of imagery is busy enough that they would be a fool to collect their own, especially with challenging drones.
- Finally, what made imagery really useful wasn’t so much the image itself, but everything that went around it – like price, speed of delivery, frequency of repetition, and who else could see the image.
As CTO, Stephen leads the technological development of TerrAvion’s autonomous camera sensors, their data pipelines, and their world-class operations. He is excited to be at the forefront of AgTech and hopes to make imagery the primary tool of the modern agronomist.
