With a name like The Mad Botter, you’d be forgiven for thinking Michael Dominick’s startup is a whimsical enterprise. Its flagship products—an artificial intelligence bot named Alice and radar system dubbed Gryphon—only serve to reinforce that impression. But despite the allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, The Mad Botter is pragmatic venture addressing real world problems.
Founded by Dominick in 2017, The Mad Botter is a software development and consultancy company based in Plant City. The company takes off the shelf hardware, such as the Microsoft Surface and Apple iPad, and repurposes them for military and civilian use in avionics and aerospace.
Dominick launched The Mad Botter after years as a freelance software developer. The venture is entirely self-funded. While doing contracted work for a military aviation company, Dominick discovered that programmable touch screens from specialty vendors cost far more than the price of an iPad from the local Apple store.
“We found that it was possible to take these off the shelf platforms and repurpose them for military use at a huge cost savings,” he said.
One of The Mad Botter’s main products is Gryphon, a tablet-based radar display system that can be mounted into the cockpit of planes. Gryphon can be programmed to accommodate various scenarios, such as training missions. For training missions, Dominick and his team of five program points and targets into the system as though they’re physically there. By repurposing off-the-shelf hardware, he said the company is able to easily reprogram the devices to load new scenarios or change the appearance of display items to suit different clients and different branches of the military.
That might sound complicated but Dominick insists the idea behind The Matter Botter is relatively straight forward: make military software more like the consumer space, so that “when you just need to push an app update, it’s a simple update and not an entire giant contracting process.”
One of Dominick’s biggest challenges is conveying to potential customers the utility of tablets. “A lot of folks in the aviation industry see these tablets as toys, not as something you would use in a production environment,” he said. As a result, Dominick considers firms that supply traditional Garmin systems as some of his biggest competitors. Other competitors include Source Toad, ThoughtBot and Accenture.
The Mad Botter continues to diversify its product offerings. Within the next few months, the company will release an automated system designed to help civilian aviation companies with things like inventory control.
Given the sensitive nature of the industry, The Mad Botter doesn’t discuss its clients in detail. Dominick wouldn’t say exactly how much he charges for products and services but said a full system build-out costs somewhere between $75,000 and $100,00. He said the company is on track to make $500,000 in revenue this year.
