This February marks the fifth anniversary for Intellisense Systems. All month long, the company is hosting celebrations as a thank you to its employees and partners.
In February 2018, in a modest conference hall tucked away in a Torrance, California business park, a group of 83 employees celebrated the launch of a new small business. President & CEO Frank T. Willis shared his vision for this new business that would leverage decades of experience in technology to devise bespoke solutions for a wide variety of military and commercial clients. One of these solutions, the Micro Weather Station (MWS®), had already enabled operations and protected U.S. troops in Afghanistan for five years, and it was ready to be manufactured for commercial customers. With this experience and expertise, the company committed to developing small, rugged, innovative solutions that made the seemingly impossible possible.
Five years later, Intellisense Systems has grown to over 180 employees and produced over 1,000 Micro Weather Stations. It has expanded its operations to two buildings with 70,000 square feet of flexible manufacturing and office space. Frank Willis is still serving as President & CEO, and the company has grown its offerings to avionics displays that reduce weight and ease pilot workload, as well as rugged flood sensors that have withstood hurricanes and automatically sent evacuation notices to first responders and city leaders.
Intellisense commemorated its five-year anniversary with customized cookies for everyone in the office. It also hosted two free lunches for all employees with complimentary company merchandise, including a tumbler, two t-shirts, and a sweatshirt. These events follow previous anniversary celebrations that included an ice cream social in 2021 and lunch with an In-N-Out food truck in 2022.
Intellisense officially began operations in September 2017 as a spinoff of Physical Optics Corporation (POC). The company merged two divisions within POC that developed advanced sensing technology through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR), a government program that fund a diverse portfolio of startups and small businesses across technology areas and markets. Combining these two divisions enabled greater investment and growth in advanced sensing projects like the MWS and the AWARE Flood System. The company has since diversified its offerings to avionics systems and artificial intelligence tools that keep military personnel safe in the field.
The company is looking forward to even greater growth and more employee appreciation events in 2023.
