Media Contacts: Jennifer Rizzi, Director, Communications, Facilities & Real Estate Services, 215.573.6107, rizzi@upenn.edu, or Heidi Wunder, Associate Director, 215.746.0123, hwunder@upenn.edu
June 23, 2016
The University of Pennsylvania’s Division of Facilities and Real Estate Services announced today that Cognitive Operational Systems, LLC (COSY) has signed a lease for an Inventor Garage within the Pennovation Center, the University’s new business, technology and laboratory incubator opening in August 2016.
COSY, a spinoff of Penn's GRASP Laboratory, is co-founded by Jonas Cleveland and Kostas Daniilidis, PhD, for leveraging research to develop industry products in artificial intelligence. COSY’s Inventor Garage will be customized for the company’s particular creative needs.
COSY’s “beacon-free” technology provides indoor localization and turn-by-turn navigation in environments with no GPS — like indoors. This back-end technology can be used to enable augmented reality interfaces, audio-based navigation aids for the blind, and even mobile robots. The COSY team was recently chosen by the prestigious 500 Startups accelerator, and is a graduate of the National Science Foundation's I-Corps program, a six-week incubator for university spinoff companies utilizing research with National Science Foundation lineage.
As an alum of Penn’s GRASP Lab, Cleveland says, “It feels like the beginning of something special in Philadelphia. The first time I walked through PERCH [Penn Engineering Research and Collaboration Hub], I was super excited. It is an incredible space — a big accomplishment by the GRASP Lab and Engineering School. COSY is commercializing bleeding edge research from Penn, so the Pennovation Center is the right place for us to be.”
COSY is the first start-up to lease an Inventor Garage at the Pennovation Center, which includes a total of five contiguous Inventor Garages along the building’s eastern façade — evoking the beginning of some of the world’s most famous technology companies in garages. Each Garage provides start-ups with space for research, development and prototyping, and features roll-up doors facing outwards to a new landscaped lawn.
“Entrepreneurs joining the Pennovation Center are bringing world-changing ideas to reality,” says Anne Papageorge, Vice President, Facilities & Real Estate Services at Penn. “The Pennovation Center provides the resources and facilities for these professionals to take their work to the next level. COSY is joining a community of innovators which is taking shape at the Pennovation Center, and we are excited to welcome them.”
About The Pennovation Center
The Pennovation Center is a 58,000 square-foot three-story facility designed for start-up companies, entrepreneurs, and inventors looking to be part of a unique community of innovators, and includes a full service technology incubator; basic wet and dry laboratories; private offices, Inventor Garages, as well as a coworking space for up to 200 members, operated by Benjamin’s Desk. It opens in August 2016 as the centerpiece of the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennovation Works, a 23-acre development adjacent to the University campus on the southern bank of the Schuylkill River providing facilities and amenities to bridge intellectual and entrepreneurial initiatives among University researchers, private sector innovators, and start-ups. Owned by the University, and operated by its Division of Facilities and Real Estate Services, Pennovation Works houses research labs from Penn’s schools of Veterinary Medicine, Dental Medicine, and Design, and start-up companies such as Qualcomm Philadelphia Research Lab, Netronix, and Novapeutics.
Visit pennovation.upenn.edu and follow Pennovation Works on Facebook, @Pennovation on Twitter, and @pennovationworks on Instagram.
Learn more about COSY at cosyrobo.com and follow them on Twitter @cosyrobo.
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