Get to know the GENIUS NY Cohort 8 teams leading up to the Pitch Finals on Oct. 28, 2024.

Manny Cerniglia is not a stranger to upstate New York. He graduated from University at Albany with a degree in public policy and worked his entire career in the telecom industry.

“I’ve always loved the idea of what phones can do,” Manny said.

Combining his education and professional expertise, Manny co-founded Flyhound. The company’s developed a device that attaches to a drone and can locate cell phones on the ground. However, the drone itself wasn’t at the heart of the company.

“[It was] combining my interest of cell phones and their growing capabilities with my education,” Manny said. “The idea was how can we take this technology and help people, and how could this benefit our public safety organizations?”

Flyhound started with the idea of being a way to locate missing hikers, who may be in locations that do not have cell phone service. However, Manny and his team saw their early customers found uses for the technology beyond locating missing hikers in the woods.

“We went through an exhaustive customer discovery process, and we spoke to over 100 agencies. We learned that not only is finding missing persons in the woods important, but so is finding people in communities where we live every day,” Manny said. “It could be a child that’s separated from their parent. It could be an elderly patient with dementia that wanders away from home. These are all things that exist and happen.”

Since incorporating in early 2022, Manny and the Flyhound team have been working on ways to expand the technology’s range and integrating into public safety agencies. Now a part of GENIUS NY Cohort 8, Manny is excited to have a space to bring the Flyhound members together and learn from the experts in Central New York’s UAS ecosystem.

“There’s been mentors that we’ve had access to that have given us insights that we wouldn’t have thought of otherwise or may have taken us a lot longer. Because we have that network of people here that are in the industry, we’ve had introductions to people who we wouldn’t have dreamed of having introductions to prior.”

Manny will present Flyhound’s technology at the GENIUS NY Pitch Finals during Innovation Night.
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