Danny Ellis

Danny is the co-founder and CEO of SkySpecs. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan with his BSE and MSE in Aerospace Engineering. In 2009, Danny founded the Michigan Autonomous Aerial Vehicles, a student team with the goal of designing, building, and competing drones. This team eventually grew into SkySpecs after 3 years of development. In 2012, Danny and Tom, along with their 3rd partner, Sam Debruin, founded SkySpecs with a goal of developing autonomous drones for the infrastructure inspection market. They joined TechArb, competed in the Michigan Clean Energy Venture Challenge taking 1st place in 2013, and took 3rd place in the student portion of Accelerate Michigan. After not making it to the finals in the business portion of Accelerate Michigan in 2013, SkySpecs came back in 2014 and took 1st place. Danny and Tom are both active alumni of Techstars after completing the R/GA Accelerator in New York City in February 2015. Danny focuses primarily on the business side of SkySpecs. He spends most of his time with customers, investors, and industry leaders. Danny facilitates strategic partnerships, fundraising, regulations, and marketing & sales. When he is working on technical problems, Danny’s background is in system integration, CAD design, and fabrication.