The next round of five GENIUS NY teams are now in residency at the Tech Garden in Syracuse as they compete to advance their companies with more than $3 million up for grabs. GENIUS NY is a business accelerator program at The Tech Garden that offers three grand prizes to the top three businesses in the competition.
The awards aren’t until the end of April, so they’ll be busy until then fine-tuning their products and services that utilize drone technologies. Ayllin Yassin came from the United Kingdom to represent her company BotsAndUs to expand their reach into America. The company has already developed robots to help improve customer service.
"Hotels is one of them, we also send our robots into big box retailers, shopping center, [and] airports, so usually we look for very dynamic public spaces," said Yassin.
One of the high-tech products being developed to address blue-green algae comes from Jason Dean of Kirkville. The former middle school STEM teacher is now pursuing his start-up company is Eget Liber to address algal blooms with a remotely operated underwater vehicle. The floating device uses specialized lighting to deal with contaminated water on the spot.
"So the killing power of the light energy goes away as soon as we click off the light, so it doesn't leave any harmful remnants of it even after we turn off the photonics," said Dean.
Other companies include DroneSeed, the company has developed a system to plant trees rapidly with a goal of making reforestation scalable. Now in its fourth year, GENIUS NY provides free office space at the Tech Garden, company stipends, and housing. Out of 17 teams that have gone through the program, 15 remain in Central New York.
