Featured Founder: Rocio Frej Vitalle of Improving Aviation

Welcome to our Featured Founder series, where you’ll meet startup founders from Tampa-St. Petersburg who are building and scaling their ventures to solve some of the world’s greatest challenges. We interviewed Rocio Frej Vitalle of Improving Aviation, a disruptive tactical intelligence platform enabling fast decision-making and autonomous response against the world’s biggest threats.

What inspired you to launch your company?

I was an aerospace engineer leading a research and development lab for a government contracting company in the aviation industry.

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Natural disasters and world conflicts pose a large threat to our communities’ resilience, and there are not enough resources to respond quickly. Bringing technology that automates the decision-making process to allocate resources in emergency response or defense has the potential to prevent and mitigate a lot of the damage that we are experiencing. What is most exciting about building this technology is the potential that our team has to make a huge difference against the biggest threats that the world is facing.

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge was building a network in the wildfire management industry, which was entirely new to me. Overcoming this hurdle required persistence and transparency, which were crucial in earning the trust of industry professionals.

Where do you see your company headed next?

We are on the brink of launching a commercial platform designed for a multitude of use cases. We have been mainly working on government contracts so far and we are getting to a point where we are close to launching an enterprise platform that can be used commercially and has the potential to be adapted to a wide range of uses.

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you’d share with another founder just starting out.

Stay humble and continue to learn every day.

Why Tampa Bay?

Initially, it was a personal choice. Who doesn’t love the Tampa area? Now it has become an amazing tech hub, we have tons of partnership potential just within the region, from academic institutions to other tech companies, defense opportunities with SOFWERX and SOCOM right down the street, and amazing ecosystem support. But what I think makes Tampa most special is the support and the sense of community that is embedded within the area startups.