Matt Sweeny

Last updated

Matthew Sweeny is an Australian-born American aviation and technology entrepreneur and inventor. [1] He is the co-founder and CEO of Flirtey, a drone delivery service.

Contents

Education

Sweeny earned a bachelor's degree in international relations and philosophy from the University of Sydney.[ citation needed ]

He became interested in unmanned aerial vehicles while studying economics in Shanghai, China on a scholarship and exchange program. [2] He built the prototype delivery drones in his dorm room. [3]

Career

After graduating, Sweeny co-founded Flirtey with Ahmed Haider and Tom Bass in 2013, as the first drone delivery service in the world. [4] He moved to the United States in 2014 and based his company in Reno, Nevada, because the city was chosen by the Federal Aviation Administration as one of six test sites for commercial drones. [5] He partnered with the University of Nevada, Reno, established a Flirtey office on campus, [6] and hired graduates from the university’s Unmanned Autonomous Systems program. [7]

In 2014, Sweeny submitted evidence to the Internal Market, Infrastructure and Employment Sub-Committee of the House of Lords European Union Committee On The Civilian Use of Drones in the EU. [8]

After moving Flirtey to the United States, Sweeny was selected in Y Combinator’s summer 2015 program. [9] [10]

In 2018, Sweeny was included on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Graham (programmer)</span> English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

Paul Graham is an English-born American computer scientist, essayist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author. He is best known for his work on the programming language Lisp, his former startup Viaweb, cofounding the influential startup accelerator and seed capital firm Y Combinator, his essays, and Hacker News. He is the author of several computer programming books, including: On Lisp, ANSI Common Lisp, and Hackers & Painters. Technology journalist Steven Levy has described Graham as a "hacker philosopher".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Helen Greiner</span> American computer scientist, engineer

Helen Greiner is a co-founder of iRobot and former CEO of CyPhy Work, Inc., a start-up company specializing in small multi-rotor drones for the consumer, commercial and military markets. Ms Greiner is currently the CEO of Tertill Corporation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Y Combinator</span> American startup accelerator

Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Stripe and Twitch. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $600 billion by January 2023. The company's accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Forbes characterized the company in 2012 as one of the most successful startup accelerators in Silicon Valley.

Airware was an American venture-funded startup that provided commercial unmanned aerial vehicles for enterprises. The company ceased operations on September 14, 2018.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sam Altman</span> CEO of OpenAI, former president of Y Combinator

Samuel H. Altman is an American entrepreneur, investor, and programmer. He is the CEO of OpenAI and the former president of Y Combinator. Altman is also the co-founder of Loopt and Worldcoin.

Startup accelerators, also known as seed accelerators, are fixed-term, cohort-based programs, that include mentorship and educational components and culminate in a public pitch event or demo day. While traditional business incubators are often government-funded, generally take no equity, and rarely provide funding, accelerators can be either privately or publicly funded and cover a wide range of industries. Unlike business incubators, the application process for seed accelerators is open to anyone but highly competitive. There are specific accelerators, such as corporate accelerators, which are often subsidiaries or programs of larger corporations that act like seed accelerators.

AngelPad is an American seed-stage startup incubator, launched in September 2010 by Thomas Korte and Carine Magescas with six other former Google employees as mentors. AngelPad provides mentorship, seed money, and networking at two 10-week courses per year.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Canopy Labs</span> Software company in Canada

Canopy Labs is a customer analytics company headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, Canada with offices in San Francisco. It was founded in 2012 and offers SaaS marketing analytics for businesses and organizations. The company is an alumnus of the Y Combinator accelerator program. Canopy Labs was acquired by Drop.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Delivery drone</span> Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) utilized to transport packages, food or other goods

A delivery drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used to transport packages that include medical supplies, food, or other goods. Given their life-saving potential, use cases for medical supplies in particular have become the most widely-tested type of drone delivery, with trials and pilot projects in dozens of countries such as Australia, Canada, Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, the UK, the US among others. Delivery drones are typically autonomous and electric, sometimes also operated as a part of a fleet.

AirPair is a service and eponymous company that connects people who need help with programming issues and people who can help them. Unlike services such as oDesk and Elance, AirPair is not a service for outsourcing programming tasks, but rather a service that facilitates one-off knowledge transfers from people with highly specialized knowledge of particular technology stacks or programming issues to people who are in need of specialized help.

Goldbelly is an online marketplace for food products. Customers can order products from restaurants, bakeries, delis, etc. and have them shipped across the United States. The ordered food sometimes requires preparation and cooking.

Aaron Iba is an American computer programmer and entrepreneur. He is known for co-authoring Etherpad, co-founding AppJet, and for his work as a partner in Y Combinator. Iba graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 with a degree in Mathematics.

Qasar Younis is a Pakistani American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He was the co-founder CEO of Talkbin, and is the former COO of Y Combinator. He left Y Combinator in March 2017 to start Applied Intuition, a technology company that is building advanced softwares and infrastructure tools for self-driving vehicles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Seibel</span> Managing director at Y Combinator

Michael Seibel is a managing director at Y Combinator and co-founder of two startups – Justin.tv/Twitch and Socialcam. He first joined Y Combinator in 2013, advising hundreds of startups, and has been active in promoting diversity efforts among startup founders.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Flirtey</span> American UAV manufacturer

Flirtey is a Reno, Nevada-based drone delivery company. The company completed the first Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)-approved drone delivery in the United States in 2015, the first FAA-approved urban delivery in March 2016 and the first FAA-approved commercial drone delivery to a customer home in July 2016. Flirtey is also developing air traffic control computer software for drones in a collaboration with NASA. One of the company's drones is in the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Zipline (drone delivery company)</span> Company that delivers medical supplies by drone

Zipline is an American company that designs, manufactures, and operates delivery drones. The company operates distribution centers in Rwanda, Ghana, Japan, the United States, and Nigeria, with signed agreements to begin service in Cote d'Ivoire and Kenya. As of April 2022, its drones have made over 20 million miles of flights across 275,000 commercial deliveries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keller Rinaudo Cliffton</span> American entrepreneur

Keller Rinaudo Cliffton is an American robotics and autonomous airplane entrepreneur and the CEO and a co-founder of Zipline.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator</span> NYC technology startup seed accelerator

Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator is an American seed accelerator launched in January 2011.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Volansi</span> San Francisco-based drone delivery company

Volansi is an American unmanned aerial vehicle logistics company. Founded in San Francisco, California in 2015, the company utilizes VTOL drones for commercial, medical and defense operations.

Apoorva Mehta is an Indian-Canadian businessman. He founded the grocery delivery company Instacart. In 2020, Mehta became a billionaire at the age of 33. As of 2021, his company was valued at $39 billion.

References

  1. ↑ "Australian start-up taking on Google, Amazon in drone delivery race". ABC. 17 May 2016.
  2. ↑ Lim, Jason. "Drone Startup Flirtey Partners with The University of Nevada, Reno To Push UAV Delivery Forward". Forbes.
  3. ↑ "The Aussie Drone Company Revolutionising A Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry". GQ. 31 March 2017.
  4. ↑ Daniel, Zoe (17 May 2016). "Game of Drones". Foreign Correspondent . Retrieved 28 July 2022.
  5. ↑ Smiley, Lauren (5 October 2014). "Reno: The biggest little drone city in the world?". The California Sunday Magazine.
  6. ↑ "UNR to conduct drone research with Australian company". Reno Gazette Journal. September 2, 2014.
  7. ↑ Lavars, Nick. "Flirtey delivery drone startup spreads its wings". New Atlas.
  8. ↑ "Written evidence - Flirtey". data.parliament.uk.
  9. ↑ "Hardware Demo Day". Tech Crunch. August 18, 2015.
  10. ↑ Townsend, Tess (Summer 2015). "5 of the Most Interesting Startups From Y Combinator Demo Day". Inc.
  11. ↑ "2018 Disruptor 50: No. 29 Flirtey". CNBC. 22 May 2018.


"This Pioneering Entrepreneur Shares Why You Should Study Philosophy Rather Than Business".

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.