Our Story

The founding story of AVIAN

AVIAN began with a real industrial problem: how to help wood processing teams detect fire risk earlier in the places people cannot watch continuously. Our first conversations with Ernest Schilliger helped turn that problem into a company.

When Drew Hanover first met Ernest Schilliger at Schilliger Holz, the conversation was not about a product. It was about an experience every sawmill owner understands: combustible material, hot machinery, dust, blind spots, and the knowledge that one missed hotspot can become a major fire.

Schilliger had lived through that risk directly. In 2017, a fire at the Haltikon sawmill caused severe damage and took hundreds of firefighters days to bring under control. Ernest was not looking for another dashboard. He wanted earlier warning in the places his team could not watch continuously.

That first Schilliger deployment became the practical test for AVIAN: thermal cameras watching critical areas around the clock, software separating real heat events from noise, and alerts that operators could act on quickly.

The lesson was simple and demanding: fire prevention only matters if it fits the way the facility actually runs. The system had to work through dust, motion, changing shifts, maintenance routines, and the normal chaos of production.

Schilliger became AVIAN's first customer and one of the reasons the product matured so quickly. Their team gave us real operating conditions, direct feedback, and the pressure to make the system useful for people who cannot afford false confidence.

Years later, that partnership is still growing. As Schilliger brings the new Lignatherm facility online, AVIAN cameras are being deployed there too, protecting a new process with new risks and the same need for reliable thermal monitoring.

AVIAN is not a camera feed with simple alert rules. The system is built by engineers with deep experience in computer vision, machine learning, robotics, thermal imaging, and industrial systems. Their work has been published in Science Robotics, Nature, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, and IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

Our team includes graduates from ETH Zurich, the University of Michigan, Michigan Tech, and other technical universities, with experience from NASA, General Motors, motorsports, advanced manufacturing, and industrial automation. That mix matters. It means the product is shaped by people who know how perception systems fail, how machines behave under load, and how little tolerance industrial teams have for unreliable alarms.

That expertise shows up in the details: camera placement, thermal signal processing, false-alarm reduction, installation planning, support, and the software operators rely on when seconds matter.

AVIAN now protects more than 50 facilities across 9 countries. The company has grown, but the standard is the same one set by that first Schilliger visit: catch heat-related risk early enough for people to respond.

No customer has left AVIAN in 3 years. For us, that is the clearest sign that the system is doing what industrial teams need: watching continuously, warning clearly, and helping them sleep a little easier at night.