After 10 years of ups, downs, pivots and startup stress, Joe Sprengard received the call he’d been hoping for. It was early 2019; Veelo Technologies had just won a massive defense contract that will be in production for the next 50 years. This exciting contract also meant Veelo would have to expand its headquarters and grow the team by almost 20 —a process that’s already well underway.
Sprengard is CEO and co-founder of Veelo Technologies, a startup manufacturer of lightweight, conductive materials. The company, now based in Cincinnati’s Woodlawn neighborhood, started out as a nanomaterials company, but after numerous iterations, the team finally hit its stride.
They’ve settled into a lucrative and cutting-edge niche within the aerospace and defense industry: creating electrically conductive materials and heating solutions for composite air vehicles like planes, missiles, rockets and “anything that flies in the sky,” Sprengard said. Opportunities abound in this niche after the industry made a monumental shift from metal to composite makeup for aircrafts.
“Metals are electrically conductive and can meet requirements such as lightning strike protection or electromagnetic interference shielding,” he said. “Well, composite materials are not as electrically conductive as metal. Currently they have to put metal back into the composite assets, but they’d rather not do that.”
Veelo Technologies, in tandem with Boeing, created an electrically conductive material system to curb the industry’s metal reliance: VeeloSTRIKE. This system is currently undergoing certification for flight on commercial and defense assets.
VeeloSTRIKE is just one of the company’s groundbreaking aerospace products. Others include VeeloHEAT, an electrically efficient, fast heating and cooling solution for advanced composites, and VeeloVEIL, a lightweight, flexible and electrically conductive material that protects against flight risks such as lightning strikes. (For background, the U.S. alone sees commercial jet airliners struck by lightning once every 1,000 flight hours, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.) Each Veelo product is revolutionary in its own right.
“Everything that we are creating is new technology,” Sprengard said. “We’re solving problems in ways they’ve never been solved before. It’s difficult because the problems aren’t easy to solve, but when you solve them, there’s a lot of satisfaction.”
The 10-year-old company was founded on innovation. It started in 2007 when University of Cincinnati inventors Dr. Vesselin Shanov and Dr. Mark Schulz uncovered a new form of carbon nanotube technology, according to Soapbox Cincinnati. Their invention caught the eye of the Wright Patterson Air Force Base, but they lacked one critical element: a business plan. That’s when Sprengard, a young entrepreneur, jumped in to help them navigate the business process. Once the three saw the viability, General Nano — now rebranded as Veelo Technologies — was formed.
Since its inception, Veelo Technologies has worked with some of the world’s largest defense corporations, including the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army and America’s Navy. Among the most esteemed is Veelo’s recent collaboration with NASA. Veelo’s product, VeeloBLAC, absorbs light waves to help NASA’s satellites capture clear and sharp information.
Veelo Technologies’ products may be out of this world, but with Sprengard’s investment in Cincinnati — product development, technology and manufacturing take place here — the company is firmly tied to the Queen City. This is where Sprengard is originally from, and he continues to be impressed by his hometown’s talent.
“We’ve had a lot of success attracting people to Cincinnati,” he said. “A lot of high-skilled labor has come out of the university systems. We’ve been thrilled with the quality and talent we’ve been able to attract to the business.”
