Master Plan
A long-term roadmap for the real-world intelligence platform
By: Chris Hacken, Founder & CEO|April 2026
Chris Hacken
Founder & CEO, Dragonfly Autonomy
Background: Deep experience in physical infrastructure construction and operations, software engineering, and building and selling technology companies. My sole focus is Dragonfly Autonomy. I'm building this company with a long-term view toward autonomous operations for physical infrastructure - taking on the dangerous, repetitive, and impossible-to-staff work that operators struggle with today.
Our mission
Build the intelligence layer for the physical world - and operate it autonomously.
The physical world is the last major environment without a unified intelligence layer. Every industry that runs on physical infrastructure operates with partial visibility, episodic inspection, and manual coordination across heterogeneous teams and tools.
The path to building that layer is starting with the vehicles already operating in it - instrumenting the existing workflow first, and using the data and relationships to add autonomous agents that take on the routine, dangerous, and impossible-to-staff parts of the work over time.
Why Dragonfly matters
Every robotics company that has tried to leap directly to autonomous physical operations has failed for the same reason - they did not have the data to operate in the real world, and they could not collect it without first instrumenting the workflows they were trying to automate. The sequence matters.
Dragonfly starts with vehicle-mounted intelligent camera systems on fleets already operating in infrastructure environments - utility trucks, municipal vehicles, rail maintenance cars. Every mile generates immediate operational value and continuous training data for the autonomous agents that come next. Camera networks lead to coordinated drone dispatch. Coordinated dispatch leads to autonomous execution of the routine and dangerous work that operators struggle to staff today. The intelligence layer is the product; the data network is the moat; autonomous operations for physical infrastructure is where this is going.
How we build
Operators first.
Everything we build is validated against one question: does it leave the person running the operation both better informed and more confident?
Awareness before automation.
You can't automate what you haven't mapped. We build toward total operational awareness first. The intelligence layer learns the work before autonomous systems do the work.
Sensor-agnostic intelligence.
We build from the ground up with computer vision at the core. Vehicle cameras, fixed sensors, and future node types all feed the same intelligence layer. The collection method is modular. The intelligence is the product.
Any node type. One platform.
Vehicle-mounted cameras today. Fixed sensors tomorrow. Autonomous drones and robots as they become viable. Every node type plugs into the same intelligence layer without rebuilding.
Continuous, not episodic.
Annual inspections miss everything that happens in between. We build for continuous intelligence - every pass adds to the picture, every observation compounds over time.
Build the network with us.
If you operate physical infrastructure and want to shape what we build, we want to hear from you.