Summary
Abraham “Abe” Bachrach is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Skydio, the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. He built Skydio’s Autonomy Engine, the computer-vision and deep-learning system that lets its drones navigate and avoid obstacles without GPS or a human pilot, drawing on doctoral research at MIT that began with test flights in his father’s backyard.
Career
Bachrach earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from UC Berkeley in 2005, then went to MIT, where from 2007 he led an award-winning autonomous-flight research program in Professor Nicholas Roy’s Robust Robotics Group. His doctoral dissertation, “Trajectory Bundle Estimation for Perception-Driven Planning,” completed under Roy’s supervision, focused on enabling drones to perceive, map, and navigate unfamiliar environments without relying on GPS — research that later became the technical foundation for Skydio’s first product (Mathematics Genealogy Project; Fly Eye). During his PhD, he met fellow MIT graduate student Adam Bry; in 2012, on a team that also included Media Lab student Matt Donahoe, the two won an Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International contest with an autonomous mini-helicopter that navigated the aftermath of a simulated nuclear meltdown (MIT News).
After completing his PhD around 2012, Bachrach and Bry joined Google[x]‘s Project Wing, an autonomous drone-delivery program, working alongside their former advisor Nick Roy, who later returned to MIT. In 2014, Bachrach, Bry, and Donahoe left to found Skydio, self-funding the company’s earliest work out of the basement of Bachrach’s father’s home in Burlingame, California — with some of the earliest prototype flights tested in his father’s backyard — before securing seed funding in 2015 and opening a first office in Atherton, California (Fly Eye).
As CTO, Bachrach has led development of Skydio’s core autonomy stack, combining onboard cameras, visual-inertial odometry, and deep learning to let its drones fly through forests, cities, and other unstructured or GPS-denied environments while avoiding obstacles and completing repeatable missions with minimal human oversight. His work underpins Skydio’s full product line, from the 2018 R1 through the enterprise- and defense-focused X10 and Dock for X10 systems introduced from 2023 onward, and he has represented Skydio publicly on drone autonomy, safety, and U.S. drone-industry policy (Skydio; Fly Eye).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Abraham Bachrach’s LinkedIn profile, Skydio’s own “About” page, an Innovator Series profile from drone-industry site Fly Eye, the Mathematics Genealogy Project’s record of his MIT dissertation, and MIT News’ feature on Skydio’s founding. His exact birth year is not confirmed in available sources and has been intentionally left blank rather than estimated.