While Silicon Valley is well-known as a mecca for the launch of flashy high-tech firms, and Detroit as the home of the older, more staid and much less exciting automotive industry, for one autonomous security drone startup the move from the former area to the latter made perfect sense.
In an interview with DRONELIFE, Keith Miao, CEO of Birdstop, a manufacturer of UAV systems used in infrastructure monitoring and security, said the company’s moved from the San Francisco Bay Area late last year to take advantage of the opportunities Detroit presented for rapidly scaling up the production of new drone systems.
With much of the U.S.-based manufacturing of electronics components and related products migrating overseas over the past decades, because of the demand from Detroit’s auto industry, the city and surrounding region have endured as one of few hubs for securing those products from U.S.-based suppliers, he said.
“There aren’t many electronics-based products that are produced at a very high volume in the United States. And when we looked around the automotive industry, it is one that still has a really large scale,” he said. “We still make over 10 million cars a year domestically.”
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