Summary
Adam Bry is the co-founder and CEO of Skydio, the largest U.S. drone manufacturer. A national champion R/C airplane pilot before college, he studied autonomous flight at MIT, co-founded Google[x]‘s Project Wing, and has led Skydio since founding it in 2014, guiding its shift from consumer “selfie drones” to autonomous systems for public safety, defense, and infrastructure.
Career
Bry began flying model aircraft at age five and became a national champion in R/C airplane aerobatics as a teenager, giving him roughly two decades of small-aircraft flight experience before he ever built a company (MIT LIDS; Police1). He earned a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in 2008, then went to MIT for a master’s degree spanning the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). There, from 2009, he joined Professor Nick Roy’s Robust Robotics Group, where he and fellow graduate student Abe Bachrach developed a fixed-wing drone that used only a laser range finder and onboard computing to autonomously navigate around obstacles in a parking garage — research that translated much of what Bry had learned as an R/C pilot into autonomous-flight software (LinkedIn; MIT News).
After graduating MIT in 2012, Bry and Bachrach joined Google[x]‘s Project Wing, an autonomous drone-delivery initiative, working there for roughly a year and a half. In 2014, Bry left to co-found Skydio with Bachrach and Matt Donahoe, a friend of theirs from the MIT Media Lab, aiming to build drones that could fly and think for themselves using low-cost, smartphone-grade chips and sensors. Bry has served as Skydio’s CEO since its founding, leading the company through the 2018 launch of its first product, the R1; its 2023 pivot away from consumer drones to focus exclusively on enterprise, public-safety, and defense customers; and its growth into the largest U.S. drone manufacturer by shipment volume, reaching a $4.4 billion valuation by 2026 (Skydio).
Bry has co-authored numerous technical papers and holds multiple patents in autonomous flight, was named to MIT Technology Review’s TR35 list of young innovators, and was appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Transportation to the FAA’s Advanced Aviation Advisory Committee (also referred to as the Drone Advisory Committee) in 2021, where he has advised on federal drone policy (MIT LIDS).
Source Notes
This profile draws on Adam Bry’s LinkedIn profile, Skydio’s own “About” page, MIT News’ feature on Skydio’s founding, an MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems seminar bio, and a Police1 interview with Bry on Skydio’s products and history. His exact birth year is not confirmed in available sources and has been intentionally left blank rather than estimated.