Philadelphia Magazine Profiles Asylon's Robot Dog Security Patrols

Asylon Robotics, a Veteran Ventures Capital Fund I portfolio company, is one of two companies at the center of "Philly's Robot Dogs Are Here. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?", a feature by Don Steinberg published by Philadelphia magazine on September 25 and running in the October print issue under the title "Sit. Stay. Good Bot."

The piece explains how Asylon's security service works. The company does not build its own four-legged robots; it runs its own software on Spot, the robot made by Boston Dynamics, and pairs the resulting DroneDogs with its aerial drones so that customers can monitor a property remotely. Patrol routes are programmed in advance, the dogs move between checkpoints on their own and avoid obstacles, they can tell a person from a vehicle, and an operator can take manual control when needed. Technicians watch the feeds around the clock from Asylon's Robotic Security Operations Center in Norristown. The dogs do not engage anyone; the company's case is that a visible patrol deters trespassing, vandalism and theft.

The magazine reports deployments at military bases, the tunnels of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Moderna's campus in Massachusetts (where the dogs are named Vax and Spike), warehouses, stadiums and corporate campuses, and it recounts an early contract patrolling a Ford lot of new Mustangs in Detroit. "Within a month, we drove the theft to zero," Damon Henry, Asylon's co-founder and CEO, told the magazine. A 2020 request from the U.S. Air Force for combined air and ground patrols at Hanscom Air Force Base is what led Asylon to add ground robots to a system that had begun with drones.

Henry and co-founder and CTO Adam Mohamed met as aerospace engineering undergraduates at MIT and worked together at Boeing's Phantom Works in Ridley Park before founding Asylon in 2015. The magazine reports that Asylon grew 80 percent last year and is on track to roughly triple this year; those figures are the magazine's.

The profile follows a month in which Bosch Ventures invested in Asylon, and it comes alongside the company's work for the U.S. Air Force security forces program. Veteran Ventures Capital invested in Asylon through Fund I.

VVC's view: a general-interest magazine spending several thousand words on how a security robot actually earns its keep is a different kind of coverage from a contract announcement, and it reaches the facility managers and corporate security buyers who decide whether a patrol gets renewed. The detail we would underline is the operations center. Asylon sells a monitored service, with people watching the feeds, and that is what turns a robot into a security product customers keep paying for.

Sources: Philadelphia magazine.

Image: Andre Rucker / Philadelphia magazine