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Orlando, FL
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This issue is for the engineers who wonder whether the work they’re doing here has a real market, and for the founders who wonder whether Central Florida is the right place to build.
Seven stories. One region. Suspiciously coherent.
Unusual Machines is building drone batteries in Orlando instead of buying them from someone else’s supply chain. Rapta flew in from out of state and planted a flag here because this is where the aerospace manufacturers are. Kore.ai published a survey saying the AI industry has a governance problem, then offered to sell you the solution. OneRail, born right here, now quietly powers same-day delivery for FedEx and Advance Auto Parts. UCF researchers cracked open the physics of the hardest thing an amphibious drone does, the moment it leaves the water. Space Florida reframed an entire industry around logistics instead of launches. And the Army’s FUZE program showed up at Tech Grove to explain how it plans to stop letting good technology die in a filing cabinet.
Many of these companies are not in the same industry, yet they are solving the same problem: how do you make a promising technology trustworthy enough to actually use? Govern the AI agent. Vouch for the part. Keep the delivery promise. Field only what works. That is the work Central Florida is doing right now, across seven different domains, in the same ten days.
Two of this issue’s companies, Kore.ai and OneRail, started here and now run infrastructure for Fortune 500 enterprises. That path is repeatable. And if you are building in autonomy, AI governance, industrial software, or defense logistics, the people who write checks into this sector are paying attention to this region.
Orlando has the Army’s drone parts, the Navy’s launch cadence, and the supply chain moving in-house. The prototype era is over.
Unusual Machines, Orlando’s drone-components maker listed on the NYSE American under the ticker UMAC, signed a lease on June 25 for roughly 14,000 square feet of manufacturing and operational space in Orlando. The new floor is for batteries. It supports the planned $52 million acquisition of Upgrade Energy, a California maker of battery and power systems, with the deal expected to close by the middle of the third quarter. Upgrade Energy runs an 18,500-square-foot plant in Torrance and brings roughly 30 engineers and production staff. CEO Allan Evans is not subtle about why: batteries are critical, a single drone needs several of them, and Unusual Machines would rather own that problem than outsource it. This follows earlier Orlando space for drone motors and headsets. The logic is consistent throughout: NDAA-compliant parts, made here, accountable to no one else’s supply chain.
Space Florida CEO Rob Long made a case at the National Center for Simulation’s Former Team Orlando Commanders’ Luncheon that deserves more attention than it got. Every state dollar in aerospace tends to pull in six to eight private dollars. Aerospace jobs in Florida average $119,000, nearly double the state’s typical wage. Florida currently has more aerospace engineers than open positions, which Long called a good problem to have. His bigger point: space is becoming a transportation conversation. Less about the rocket, more about what it carries and how reliably it gets there, which is where Central Florida supports its neighbor. Cape Canaveral is at record launch cadence. SpaceX and Blue Origin are still expanding. The industry already made this shift. The rest of the economy is catching up.
The excitement now is in throughput: batteries built domestically on Orlando’s factory floors, launch cadence treated like freight out of Cape Canaveral, supply chains pulled home.
What’s in it for you:
The lab where amphibious drones are tested is ten minutes from the briefing room where the Army decides what training simulations get funded. That is not a coincidence.
At UCF, Associate Professor Samik Bhattacharya and master’s student Dominic Polidoro are studying egress, the moment an amphibious drone leaves the water and becomes an aircraft. As the wing breaks the surface, lift spikes and then drops off sharply. That swing arrives before the vehicle can respond to it, which means the aircraft is most vulnerable at the exact moment it is gaining the air. Using 3D-printed wings in UCF’s Experimental Fluid Mechanics Lab, the team is building the mathematical models that would let designers either ride that lift surge or smooth it over. The nine-month project is funded by the DEVCOM Army Research Office, with early findings presented at AIAA SciTech in January. Bhattacharya sees the civilian payoff as clearly as the military one: one vehicle that moves cleanly between water and sky could replace the two separate ones currently required for coastal search-and-rescue and disaster response.
That research does not exist in a vacuum. UCF founded its Institute for Simulation and Training in 1982, the first university in the country to offer graduate degrees in modeling and simulation, and within a couple of years IST sat in Central Florida Research Park alongside the military’s training commands. The roots run deeper still: the Army and Navy had moved their training-device work to Orlando from Long Island back in 1965. The amphibious drone project is the newest room in a very old building. What makes the building credible is that Orlando’s simulation expertise was never purely military, and it was never purely entertainment. The technology has always run in both directions. Edwin Link sold the first flight simulator to amusement parks before he sold it to the Army. Theme park engineers contributed directly to the Navy’s “Battle Stations 21” sailor training system. In May 2026, UCF and Universal launched a joint school with $10 million in funding built around exactly this kind of immersive, experience-driven technology. The defense industry and the entertainment industry have been drawing from the same engineering talent, the same simulation techniques, and the same institutions in Orlando for a century. UCF sits at the center of both.
A few miles away, Matt Willis walked a Tech Grove audience through how any of this actually reaches a soldier. Willis directs FUZE, the Army’s flagship initiative for moving dual-use commercial technology into military use fast. PIT, the Pathway for Innovation and Technology, is the mechanism meant to get around the acquisition process that has historically let useful tools collect dust. The system was not designed for speed, and FUZE is trying to rewire it from the inside. Willis named four priorities for the next 18 to 24 months: autonomous breaching, tactical logistics, expeditionary power, and Arctic operations. He was direct that none of it scales without cheaper capital, which is why FUZE is building relationships with venture and private investors. His bottom line: with the right leadership, the team can finally do the work instead of just talking about it.
The person now running IST is Carolina Cruz-Neira, the computer scientist who invented the CAVE virtual reality system in 1992, the room-scale immersive environment that became the global standard for military simulation training. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, was inducted into the AWE XR Hall of Fame in 2024, and currently leads UCF’s work on digital twins and immersive interfaces, research that has informed training for NASA, the U.S. military, and the national labs. The technology that makes a soldier’s training environment believable enough to transfer skill to the battlefield traces back to work she did before most of this region’s aerospace engineers were born.
UCF supplies the science. FUZE supplies the path to fielded capability. The distance between a lab result and an Army contract doesn’t require a highway.
What’s in it for you:
The company quietly running FedEx’s same-day delivery was founded in Orlando, scaled here, and never left.
When a national retailer promises you a part the same day, there is a reasonable chance an Orlando company is making that promise keepable. OneRail expanded its partnership with Advance Auto Parts on June 17 to support same-day fulfillment across the retailer’s full store network. The two have worked together for more than four years across more than 4,000 locations, coordinating tens of millions of deliveries a year using a mix of Advance’s own fleet and third-party drivers. The idea is to treat thousands of stores as one distributed warehouse. CEO Bill Catania puts it plainly: having the part is only half the battle if you cannot get it to the customer fast. This lands in a busy stretch. In March, FedEx chose OneRail to power FedEx SameDay Local service, and OneRail built its mode-agnostic delivery decisioning engine, OmniSTAR, in collaboration with NVIDIA.
The company that now runs FedEx’s same-day delivery started in Orlando. Same-day delivery feels ordinary to the customer. The infrastructure that makes it possible is not, and a growing share of it is built here.
What’s in it for you:
The enterprise AI company that published a warning about its own industry was founded in Orlando in 2013. It now has a thousand people and sets the terms of the national conversation.
The most useful thing an Orlando company published this cycle was a warning about its own industry. Kore.ai, founded here in 2013 and now about a thousand people strong, released its 2026 Agent Productivity Index, a survey of more than 400 IT leaders at U.S. companies with at least 2,000 employees. The numbers are not flattering to anyone. Seventy-two percent say their AI agents operate with unmanaged financial or compliance risk. Seventy-nine percent have reversed an action an agent took. Seventy percent have hit a failure their teams could not trace. More than half are running agents they do not fully understand, and forty-two percent have tied lost revenue to an agent failure. Governance concerns have delayed deployments for sixty-two percent of respondents. Founder and CEO Raj Koneru’s read: enterprise AI has moved past proving the technology works and into proving it can be trusted. CMO Peter Mullen put the distinction plainly: watching an agent is a different thing from governing one. Kore.ai’s Artemis platform is built to do the latter, with controls applied before anything goes live.
The value in enterprise AI is shifting from the model to the guardrails around it. An Orlando company is writing that chapter.
What’s in it for you:
Rapta did not choose Orlando for the weather. It chose Orlando because the aerospace manufacturers, the defense contracts, the university engineers, and the government partners were already here.
Orlando picked up a vote of confidence from a company that did not start here. Rapta, a manufacturing-intelligence company, opened its Florida Regional Headquarters on June 19 to serve aerospace, defense, space, and advanced manufacturing customers across Florida and the eastern U.S. The software sits on the factory floor and instruments the human decisions that determine whether a part is built right. It provides real-time guidance at the point of work, generates the traceable evidence that certification and audits require, and CEO Aaron Brown says it can be running inside an existing plant in days. The pressure it addresses is one every manufacturer recognizes: expand capacity, move faster, train new workers quickly, and hold quality steady as products grow more complex. Rapta did not choose Orlando by accident. It went where the aerospace and defense manufacturers, the engineering talent, the universities, and the government partners already are.
When an out-of-state manufacturer needed a home for its eastern operations, it read the same density this issue describes. That is the signal.
What’s in it for you:
No single headline dominated this cycle. That is the point.
Kore.ai wants governance built into AI agents from day one. Rapta puts traceable evidence on the factory floor. Unusual Machines owns its battery supply chain rather than hoping someone else’s holds. OneRail turns available inventory into a delivery you can count on. UCF is making an unreliable maneuver dependable enough to fly. FUZE is pulling proven technology out of the lab and into a soldier’s hands. Space Florida is treating space as freight that has to arrive on schedule.
Speculative economies chase the next demo. Maturing ones build the infrastructure that makes the last demo repeatable. Central Florida is doing the latter, across seven different domains, simultaneously.
There is one more thread worth naming. Central Florida did not become the place where the Army, Navy, and Air Force park their simulation programs by claiming the title. It earned that position because its simulation expertise has run in two directions at once for the better part of a century, military and entertainment, pulling from the same talent and the same techniques. Look closely at what each company here is doing. UCF is working out the physics of the instant a machine has to be trusted to fly. Kore.ai is building the proof that an AI agent will behave. Rapta is generating the evidence that a part was made right. Every one of them is working on the same moment: when a real person has to trust a complex system and act on it. That is the region’s oldest expertise, running through its newest industries.
These efforts also feed one another, and they are pointing somewhere specific. The Orlando 2045 Regional Vision sets a concrete target: a top 10 U.S. innovation hub, the No. 1 place to live in the nation, a global creative capital built on more than tourism. What this issue documents is what that looks like while it is being assembled. Not announced. Assembled.
The capital Space Florida and FUZE attract funds the manufacturers. The manufacturers draw companies like Rapta in to instrument them. The universities supply the science and the engineers. The platforms born here carry Orlando’s name into national accounts and bring the attention back home. Each piece makes the others more valuable.
The quiet news this week was the sound of an ecosystem getting harder to dislodge.
Sources
Orlando’s One Rail Expanded partnership to support same-day fulfillment across Advance’s stores
Orlando’s Kore.ai Featured in Inc.: The AI Blind Spot Costing Enterprises Millions (and How to Fix It)
Unusual Machines Expands Orlando Manufacturing Footprint to Support Battery Operations
Disrupting Industries and Creating New Categories: Orlando’s Suneera Madhani
Announcing the Central Florida Smart Business Dealmaker Award Winners and 2026 Dealmakers Hall of Fame Class
NSF-Funded VERA Platform Scales Up Remote VR Research
Future Forward: Technology and leadership driving Central Florida’s long-term growth
AI-powered manufacturer opens Orlando headquarters to serve aerospace and defense industry
Florida Space Research Consortium Names UCF’s Alain Berinstain as Director
UCF, Air Force Partnership Expands Opportunities in National Security Research, Student Training
Influential Women Spotlights Kathy Wiebe: Veteran Entertainment And Production Leader With 30+ Years
UCF Featured at Augmented World Expo: Robo firefighters, holographic assistants and universal remotes: Inside the Augmented World Expo
Qualcomm is powering most of this new tech. Here are a few developments that illustrate how mixed reality and the metaverse stand to change our world
EA SPORTS Madden NFL 27 – Official Reveal Trailer – Nintendo Switch 2
Orlando Science Center debuts first large-scale augmented reality display
WOW! Expands All-Fiber Network to 20,000 More Homes and Businesses in Central Florida
Making magic in central Florida: RoMac Building Supply boldly draws a blueprint for growth.
NASA Public-Private Partnership to Advance Mars Science Technology Through Aeolus Atmospheric‑Science Instrument
Laser Photonics and Fonon Technologies Unveil Advanced Laser Wire Processing Solution for Avionics and Military
One New Thing: Virtual Reality Enters the Classroom
The LGL Group, Inc. Announces Strategic Investment in Skyline Instruments Corporation
Coke Florida completes $84M renovation of Orlando distribution center
Marco’s Pizza Expands Headquarters with New Operations Center of Excellence in Orlando
CPE ST3 Staff Marks U.S. Army’s 251st Birthday, Recognizes Nation’s 250th Anniversary
Army-funded UCF research tackles a tricky moment for amphibious drones
Space Florida CEO shares vision for Florida’s expanding aerospace economy to Team Orlando leaders
Army’s Pathway for Innovation and Technology presentation prepares soldiers for future challenges
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