Apellix of Jacksonville, Florida, is changing how the world looks at drones and their cleaning, protection, and other capabilities.
From decontaminating military properties affected by chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) attacks to cleaning industrial facilities, stadiums, and high-rise buildings, to measuring the thickness of paint and steel tanks on oil and gas plants to clearing roadsides from New York to the United Arab Emirates of pollutant gases, Apellix is expanding and refining the amazing potential of drones.
Apellix is leading North America and the world to a new era of technology-driven property maintenance and cleaning. With the leading cause of labor-related fatalities in the United States being “falls from a height,” this visionary company has utterly changed how the exteriors of buildings are cleaned: safely, for a start.
“At Apellix, we create elegant, transformative solutions to keep workers safe,” says Robert Dahlstrom, CEO, who reiterates the need for these products. “This is 2024. Why are people still hanging off buildings doing work?”
In a world where worker safety is an ever-growing concern, the company’s approach to employing drones makes sense. “Using drones as a platform to maintain facilities and clean structures is a safer, faster, and more economical way of maintaining structures,” Dahlstrom continues.
Besides cleaning, proper maintenance is also of the utmost importance to raising safety standards. The company’s applications focus mainly on standard procedures in the oil and gas industry where measuring the thickness of steel and other functions is imperative to human safety. And these capabilities are proving invaluable.
As steel corrodes, setting finite performance limits for components, Apellix’s drones measure the changing state of tanks, pipes, and other steel infrastructure as a safety mainstay for large oil and gas plants—especially where dangerous gases, high-pressure zones, and other threats can endanger human life.
“To our knowledge, we have the only drone in the world that can autonomously go into class I, division II hazardous locations and make physical contact with structures to take measurements,” Dahlstrom says.
Taking these capabilities a step further, about three years ago the company started developing a model to powerwash buildings, which it introduced to the global market just over a year ago. The product has proven wildly popular, with more than 19 companies from more than 13 countries visiting the Apellix facility to see this powerful new tool perform its magic. As a result, Apellix has seen impressive growth during this time as its new powerwash drone has shot to fame.
Rather than physically contacting structures, the new drone hovers a short, set distance from its target, washing it with a controlled stream of high-pressure cleaning agents. Tethered to terra firma, these drones manage hoses handling pressures of around 3500 psi, pumping eight gallons per minute. There is also a soft-wash, 300 psi option for less intense cleaning demands. “Our drone does both pressure- and soft-washing,” Dahlstrom explains.
The high adoption rate for these straightforward cleaning devices is due at least in part to the fact that they are so easy to implement and operate compared to more complex models performing more sophisticated tasks and needing a lot more technological savvy.
Apellix, Dahlstrom’s second company, followed in the footsteps of his first, a highly successful firm that specialized in software security applications. Within this context, Dahlstrom sees drones as flying computers, redefining the realms of software development and airborne devices simultaneously.
These innovative ideas have been a long time in the making. Painting houses while getting his education—even then a visionary entrepreneur— Dahlstrom happened upon the idea of employing drones to do the grunt work while wielding a paint roller one fateful day. “I had the idea for a spray-painting drone—keeping everything on the ground, tethered. I built a prototype and it worked better than I expected,” he says with a smile. The rest, as they say, is history.
Establishing Apellix on the back of this innovation and its patent, Dahlstrom never looked back. “This unlocks such a huge amount of economic value. It is, quite often, so much cheaper and so much faster.”
Apellix has sold over a million dollars’ worth of wash drones in the first six months of the product’s introduction. Since its inception in 2014, the company has spent a decade developing, designing, and fabricating top-quality drones. In parallel, the team has streamlined its research and development process to encourage sleek and easy pivoting to new applications of its ever-evolving drone technology.
As an intensely committed CEO, some of Dahlstrom’s greatest rewards come in the form of customer feedback. And for him, “every hour a drone is flying is an hour that somebody is not at risk of falling.” After all, optimally functioning drones bearing the Apellix brand indicate happy, safe, and successful customers.
Although the company’s drones are widely copied by opportunists abroad, right down to the company colors, Apellix customers know that by investing in its original equipment they are guaranteed premium customer support, top quality, and outstanding longevity on every drone. In this way, the company genuinely becomes its clients’ safety partner. One of its proudest moments was when Dahlstrom woke up to an almost miraculous social media feed one morning, following the cleaning of the Dallas Cowboys World Headquarters by a customer using Apellix equipment.
Similarly, another customer recently cleaned Disney’s headquarters in Anaheim, California, landing a handsome contract with the global giant on the back of the company’s recommendation.
This brings us to the incredible range Apellix is developing for the United States military. “The army saw our washing drone and they saw the development of our spray-painting drone,” says Dahlstrom. When the Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) Defense Division of the Department of Defense (DoD) came across the company’s work, it wasted no time getting the team to start working on technology that could protect, recover, and return state assets and surrounding air to a safe state following exposure to an episode of CBRN warfare.
The DoD project is seeing the birth of a new type of drone operation, capable of scanning, washing, and spraying affected areas of army assets with an existing light-activated decontaminant, similar to a latex-based paint, to decontaminate the air surrounding it as part of operation Apellix Breathe™. With a launch version of the product on its way soon, this dual-application technology will be employed in both industry and military operations while more sophisticated iterations continue to be developed.
To Dahlstrom, these drones could potentially prevent acts of aggression when enemies realize that nitrogen oxide attacks would be futile in the presence of technology that can thwart the efficacy of such attacks, reducing a 10-hour asset recovery process to 10 minutes. “Unlike a lot of drones that are weapons of war, we have just removed the incentive to drop a chemical weapon in the first place,” he says.
According to Dahlstrom, this is only the beginning. Predicting the momentum of the current wave of rapid technological evolution and its adoption in the market, the proof is evident in the company’s 300 percent growth rate for the year to date.
In the process, the company ensures that it benefits the greater good through charitable acts, as well. As a proud supporter of organizations like Pledge 1% and Founders Pledge, Apellix is dedicated to making corporate philanthropy commonplace around the world.
In his own capacity, Dahlstrom also supports the SYDA Foundation, which endeavors to maintain and cultivate the Siddha Yoga tradition. Another organization that benefits from his backing, PRASAD.org, works hard to provide various levels of healthcare and economic support to vulnerable individuals in the United States, Mexico, and India.
Dahlstrom speaks with equal generosity about the people who are the heartbeat of the firm. “I’m so blessed. We have so many amazing people that work for us at Apellix,” he says. “It’s one of these technologies that people see, they love, and then they want to come and work for us.”
Employing scientists from some of the most highly acclaimed global institutions, with more résumés arriving than the firm has vacant positions, the team is genuinely grateful for its good fortune.
As the company’s products are essentially flying computers, Dahlstrom sees the company’s mission as even bigger than that of developing self-driving cars. “We’re in a sexy area. What we’re trying to do with our future development is actually more complicated than self-driving cars,” he says. “Because a self-driving car, you tell it to stop, it just stops. If you tell a drone to stop, it falls out of the sky.”
The challenge is real. With drones making as many as 200 adjustments in a single second to simply enable hovering, the volume of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision that goes into creating these machines is significant. Add to that continuous research and development to improve existing technology, and it quickly becomes clear just how big the task is.
“It’s light years ahead of whatever you would do with a ground-based system like a self-driving car,” says Dahlstrom. The fact that Apellix vastly increases the safety factor on projects where its aircraft are employed makes the tremendous success of service companies using the machines even sweeter. Because seeing more people thrive—safely—remains one of Apellix’s greatest ambitions.
