Industrial missions. Flown for you.
Synapse Aerospace flies autonomous aircraft for survey, inspection and search missions. We own the fleet, so we can put many aircraft on one job at the same time and deliver the data fast.
The technology
Four layers, every one of them ours.
Airframes change from mission to mission. The software does not. Every aircraft we fly runs the same four layers, so what one flight teaches the fleet carries into the next. Read bottom to top — it's the same order the aircraft does. The flight controller keeps the aircraft alive; everything above it earns authority one bounded capability at a time.
Flight Control
The sovereign layer, and the only one every mission shares regardless of payload. Attitude, safety gates, and hard real-time guarantees that don't change no matter what the aircraft is carrying or what it's been asked to do. Written from scratch — no autopilot forks, no black box we can't open at three in the morning.
Autonomy
Perception and mission behavior, adapted to whatever payload and mission are active. Untrusted by design: every capability is requested and granted, never assumed. Flight control stays the final arbiter. Arming never leaves the human. Right now it rides in the co-pilot's seat — reading every flight, handshaking with flight control, and earning the controls one capability at a time.
Ground Control
The operator's window into the mission: live telemetry, direct control, device management — and the layer that reconfigures itself around whatever payload is mounted. Shows only what the data can actually defend.
Mission Intelligence
This is the fleet's memory: every aircraft uploads its logs the moment it lands, bound to the unit that flew it. The system reads them, works out which parameters should change, and pushes the change back down to the aircraft. Recommendations carry their reasoning. The loop closes without anyone hand-editing a config file — and it compounds across every flight the fleet has ever made.
Flight Control → Autonomy → Ground Control → Mission Intelligence
How we actually work
Engineered like an aerospace company. Iterated like a startup.
Our own CI, our own infrastructure, code review that doesn't bend. We test in simulation before we fly, and we never guess when a five-minute flight test can tell us the truth.
One variable per flight
Change one thing, predict the outcome before takeoff, grade it after. Multi-variable flights are how programs lose the ability to know what worked.
Measured beats predicted
Every constant in the stack — throttle curves, vibration bands, control gains — was replaced by a real measurement the same day it was first estimated.
Every failure becomes a test
A false alarm, a bad recommendation, a failed test flight — each one becomes a permanent regression test named after the incident. We don't get to make the same mistake twice.
No claim without a source
If we can't source a fact to a file, a log, or a measurement, we don't ship the claim.
Missions
Built for land, energy and search.
Industrial work, not hobby flying. These are the missions our aircraft and payloads are built around.
Land
Cadastre
Property boundaries and parcel mapping, flown and processed as one job.
Topography
Terrain models and contour data for planning, construction and land management.
Energy
Wind turbine inspection
Close-up inspection of blades and towers without sending a technician up.
Energy grid inspection
Lines, towers and substations inspected along the full corridor.
Solar panel inspection
Whole plants scanned for failed panels and faulty strings.
Thermal and search
Thermal applications
Heat signatures show what a visible-light camera cannot.
Finding missing people
Large search areas covered quickly, with several aircraft in the air at once.
Three aircraft, one payload system
The right aircraft for the job.
Every Synapse aircraft carries interchangeable payloads. The payload defines the mission, and the same software runs on all of them. Swap what is mounted, and the ground station reconfigures the mission around it.
Quadcopter
Hovers, holds position and flies close to the asset. The platform for turbine blades, towers, rooftops and tight sites where an inspector needs to see detail.
Fixed-wing VTOL
A tailsitter: takes off and lands vertically with no runway, then flies like a plane. Built for long endurance over large areas and long corridors, where the aircraft does not need to stay in one place.
Tilt-rotor
Flies fast to a distant target, hovers in place to capture data, then returns. Built for missions where the target is far away and the aircraft must hold a static position once it arrives.
The service model
We don't sell aircraft. We fly the mission and deliver the result.
You tell us what you need to know about a site, a line or a search area. We choose the aircraft and the payload, fly it autonomously, process the raw data ourselves, and hand you something you can act on.
Because we own the fleet, a big job is not a long job. We put as many aircraft on it as it needs, all at once.
What you receive
Data you can use, not raw footage.
We process the raw data in-house, with pipelines we built ourselves. That keeps turnaround short and costs low, and it means the people who flew the mission are the people who prepare your results.
Maps and orthomosaics
Georeferenced imagery of the whole site, ready for survey and planning work.
Terrain models and point clouds
Measurable 3D data of the ground and of the structures on it.
Thermal imagery
Heat data tied to a position on the asset, so a fault can be found again.
Inspection findings
What we saw, where we saw it, and the data behind it. Not a folder of raw files.
Leadership
Three founders. Three disciplines. One company.
Sergio Virahonda
CEO & Chief Product Architect
Sets the direction of the company and designs the system behind it. A decade of backend engineering in high-stakes fintech — JPMorgan, Capital One — building production-grade, event-driven systems where a mistake costs real money, on top of a foundation in electronics and telecommunications engineering. He architects the deep-tech vision and the engineering culture behind Synapse. Software, cloud, and hardware aren't separate disciplines to him — they're one system.
Ernesto Morales
CFO & Chief Aerospace Engineer
Owns the numbers: pricing, financing and the sales conversation, backed by a long career doing business in the energy sector. Trained as an aerospace engineer at Zodiac Aerospace — now part of Safran — designing aircraft components in CATIA, experience that has sharpened his eye to push our airframes to the very best performance. Went on to certify Mexico's first IoT electricity meter through the national utility lab, then built a track record in energy infrastructure, from a 46 MW portfolio to half a gigawatt of substation development. He knows the grid, the assets and the buyers Synapse flies for.
Rodrigo Cangas
CCO & Head of Flight Operations
Ten years in the drone industry. A licensed pilot and a software engineer, he knows the market, its opportunities and its potential alliances, and leads the commercial side of Synapse. He directs every field test campaign, takes each aircraft to its limits, and turns what he learns into airframe requirements. A decade of using drones as data-acquisition machines taught him what a payload has to deliver in the field, and he architects Synapse's payload systems around it.
Tell us the mission. We'll fly it.
Survey, inspection or search: describe what you need to know. We scope the mission, put the aircraft on it, and deliver processed data you can act on.