Good morning,
Andrew Winkler’s startup dreams came with a considerable cost. Literally: It cost his company around $500,000 to develop his latest product. And he’s found an unexpected way to pay for it.
In 2016, Winkler launched his engineering startup Thunderbolt Software in the hopes of developing next-gen technology that organizations like the U.S. military might find useful. The former Lockheed Martin engineer had the expertise, but not the capital--until, one day on LinkedIn, he saw an ad for Amazon’s Delivery Service Partner program. Yes, Thunderbolt funds its most expensive future-of-tech-style projects with a novel source of revenue: a side gig delivering packages for Amazon.
The Egg Harbor Township, New Jersey-based startup, which ranks No. 94 on this year’s Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in America, had $5.7 million in revenue last year and employs around 120 people. Twenty percent are engineers with advanced degrees who perform complex calculations for weapons programs and other military projects. The rest are drivers, many recruited from a nonprofit organization serving the Latinx community.
For the past two years, they’ve been driving people’s Amazon orders across the New Jersey region--allowing the engineers to toil away on large-scale drone projects. Read our story to learn how the unique partnership helped launch this startup to hypergrowth. |
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