Aether’s Visionary Sensing™ technology revolutionizes greenhouse gas emissions management with a novel sensing technique that mimics the way our eyes perceive color. Our Visionary Sensor™ system detects and measures chemical gases from a distance without complex optics or lab-style equipment. Tuned for methane, our sensor offers precise detection and quantification of fugitive and enteric releases. Future versions will detect a range of organic and industrial chemical gasses, including chemical warfare agents.
Aether was born from FedTech’s Homeland Security Startup Studio. From the start, our mission has been to develop better sensors to detect and quantify harmful chemical gasses that pose risks to our nation’s military and first responders. Since our founding, our mission has expanded to include chemical gasses that pose a risk not just to our nation, but to our planet – Greenhouse Gasses (GHG). Our mission is to:
At Aether, we’re committed to developing Visionary Sensing™ technologies that help ensure life on Earth.
The human eye is capable of discerning about a million colors. It does this by utilizing three types of cone cells that can each register about 100 shades of color, resulting in around one million combinations. Working with one of the U.S. Government’s premier national defense laboratories, Aether has developed a sensor that mimics the human eye’s ability to see color. We call this Visionary Sensing™. Our Visionary Sensors™ can literally “see” chemical gasses in outdoor air. This unique and innovative biomimetic approach results in a completely passive stand-off sensor that is ideally suited for continuous monitoring of GHG and other potentially harmful chemical gas emissions.
Our Visionary Sensor™ suite is dramatically less expensive than currently fielded monitoring equipment, easier to operate, easier to maintain and can be deployed in the harshest environments. Most of the emissions monitoring solutions in use today require a sensor carried by a person, aircraft or satellite to take a momentary snapshot in time. That snapshot is then aggregated with other similar snapshots to form an extrapolated assessment of the potential gas release. The problem is, the operator has to guess, or hope, that the snapshot is being taken at the right place and the right time to catch the emission and plot its source. Aether’s Visionary Sensors™ are cost-effective, SWAPC optimized, completely passive, and provide continuous monitoring.
Our Visionary Sensor™ optimized for methane detection and quantification is ideally suited for agricultural and waste management applications. Our small, rugged, and persistent sensor is designed with cattle operations, poultry farms, manure ponds, rice paddies and landfills in mind. We’ve designed our Visionary Sensor suite to be as close to “set it and forget it” as possible, eliminating many of the headaches and expense of currently available methane monitoring tools.
On the modern battlefield and the front lines of homeland defense, our soldiers and security forces face unprecedented threats from chemical warfare agents, toxic industrial chemicals, pharma-based agents, and so-called “Novichuks” or fourth-generation agents. Stand-off chemical threat detection sensors available today are large, costly and require extensive training to operate. Aether’s Defense line of sensors have optimized SWAP (size, weight, and power) for military applications, along with significantly reduced cost of ownership. Our sensors are easy to use with minimal training or expertise required. Our sensors are compatible with several classes of small UAVs and robotic platforms. Our sensors can also easily be adapted to serve as unattended ground sensors for advanced warning of an approaching gas cloud.
Our sensors are easily adapted to a wide range of industrial and smart city uses. Our small and highly reliable sensors can form the basis of a distributed point cloud for advanced chemical detection to both warn of approaching hazards and monitor air quality for specific chemical markers. Our sensors can be used for compliance monitoring as well as anomaly detection in a variety of settings. We are easily integrated into existing IoT infrastructures.
Dirk is Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Aether LLC with more than 25 years of experience in the defense and security industry, and has served in operations and business development roles throughout his career, including overseas projects in more than 22 countries. He has an MBA in International Business.
Don is Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Aether LLC with 30+ years of experience in the Fire Service culminating in appointment as Deputy Fire Chief. AS Degree in Fire Science, California Fire Officer Certification, and multiple state, regional and federal certs. He has founded and co-founded startups in incident and emergency management vertical.
Shaman is Co-Founder and Chief Financial Officer of Aether LLC with 20+ years of global supply chain experience. His previous ventures helped multiple Fortune 500 companies acquire and distribute electronics, software, and media. His focus is primarily on products and services related to Smart Cities, Public Safety, and Building Automation technologies. He has an MBA and a Master’s in Innovation.
Bradley Bray is co-founder and Chief Science Officer of Aether LLC with over ten years of experience managing chemical research and development (R&D) projects and scientists throughout his career. He has overseen numerous product development initiatives from inception through commercialization, including designing new processes to ensure novel technologies’ successful creation and implementation. Mr. Bray has a Master’s in Corporate Innovation & Entrepreneurship and a B.Sc. in Biochemistry with a Minor in Chemistry.
Dr. Major has a Ph.D. in Nanoscale Science and is an innovative thinker with multiple accepted and filed patents. He is a co-inventor of the biomimetic methodology underlying Aether’s Visionary Sensing™ products. He has several published works describing that approach, with computational proof, and specific experiments completed to showcase the solution’s novelty, including those successfully detecting RDX and classifying multiple chemicals simultaneously using the novel CIE-IR chart.
Jon Fenner is a seasoned software engineer with a passion for building robust and scalable web applications. With over 20 years of experience in the tech industry, Jon has honed his skills in front-end and back-end development, mastering languages such as JavaScript, Python, and Ruby on Rails. His expertise extends to cloud platforms and DevOps practices, ensuring seamless deployment and maintenance of his projects.