Aptima Named a Fast Company “2021 Best Workplaces for Innovators”
“AI company provides seed money for promising internal projects and has a venture arm to commercialize its homegrown technologies”
August 4th, 2021—Woburn, MA— Aptima, a small business that is advancing how humans and AI work together, announced today its inclusion as a winner on Fast Company’s “2021 Best Workplaces for Innovators” list. This is Fast Company’s third annual list of “100 Best Workplaces for Innovators, created in collaboration with Accenture, [and] celebrates companies and organizations from around the world that fostered creative cultures during a period of unprecedented global disruption.”
Aptima was recognized for its Internal Research and Development (IR&D) program, which provides seed money for projects designed to produce scientific findings or technological advances that significantly influence Aptima’s growth and serve its US Government customers. With COVID-19 eliminating staff travel, Aptima took advantage of using this “found time” by increasing spending on Internal Research and Development from $376,320 in 2019 to $835,000 in 2020—a 121.9% year over year increase. The company funded more than 35 projects proposed by individuals or teams of employees, an ongoing bottom-up approach that ideas help fuel Aptima’s culture of innovation.
Three of the IR&D projects were devoted to COVID-19, including the “Seeking COVID Hackathon.” This internal event leveraged the COVID Open Research Dataset to bring together a variety of folks from across Aptima to work towards ingesting coronavirus-related publications. The event applied Aptima’s Seek Platform and YAADA data pipeline to answer questions about the relationship between authors and topics, and generated a language model to ideate in this space.
Aptima was also recognized by Fast Company for its ongoing commitment to commercialization of its innovations: in 2014, Aptima, Inc. launched Aptima Ventures, LLC, whose sole mission is to identify and commercialize high-potential, early-stage technologies originating from Aptima, Inc. In 2020, Aptima Ventures launched venture-funded Sentinel Occupational Safety, providing ‘safety as a service’ for hazardous and confined space workers. Sentinel’s core technology, the SafeGuard Monitoring SystemTM, is a commercial-grade health and safety monitoring system. The system is the result of an innovative best-practice concept of “stitching” together multiple completed projects, initially funded by the Government through the Small Business Innovative Research Program (SBIR), in pursuit of well-defined end objectives by Aptima. Originally developed for US Air Force maintenance workers, the SafeGuard system uses cutting-edge wearable sensors, contextualized sensing, and AI-based analytics to allow its users to proactively detect and prevent impending dangers that the human eye cannot see. To date, Sentinel received $500K of venture capital investment to accelerate its ability to sell SafeGuard to both industry and government organizations with a need for technology-enabled safety assurance.
Today, with the launch of Sentinel and as part of its broader innovation strategy, Aptima continues to develop additional sensor technologies that can be used by its Government customers AND integrated directly into SafeGuard. This strategy provides a clear, immediate, and mutually beneficial arrangement that enhances the SafeGuard offering with novel state-of-the-art sensor technologies, while providing Aptima innovators with a built-in roadmap for product sales in both the public and private sectors.
To see the complete list, go to: https://www.fastcompany.com/best-workplaces-for-innovators/2021
About Aptima, Inc.
For 25 years, Aptima’s mission has been to improve and optimize performance in mission-critical, technology-intensive settings. Visit www.Aptima.com.
Media Contact:
Joel Greenberg
DCPR
Joel@dcpr.com
202-363-1065 | 202-669-3639 cell
