Founder & CEO of AEI
Unknown and ever-changing subsurface conditions create outsized risk across mining, infrastructure, and agriculture– driving safety hazards, operational downtime, and costly remediation. Yet subsurface intelligence today is dominated by episodic surveys and sparse point measurements that are slow to repeat, difficult to scale across large distances, and poorly suited to detecting the early, subtle changes that often precede failure.
To bridge this visibility gap, Applied Environmental Intelligence (AEI) introduces SubSONIC, a proprietary subsurface imaging software platform that uses data collected by fiber optic cables to provide continuous, low-latency images of below-ground structure. SubSONIC converts vibrations recorded on fiber directly to subsurface properties using physics-informed machine learning, eliminating the latency associated with status quo methods. The result is continuous subsurface insight in real time that scales over distances up to 100 km.
I founded AEI alongside UW Professors Brad Lipovsky and Marine Denolle out of our collective desire to take innovation out of the lab and into applied settings with life-saving impacts. Our team combines deep expertise in geophysics and fiber optic sensing with a focus on building deployable, validated software for commercial monitoring. Supported by UW CoMotion, we secured the maximum non-dilutive award in the UW Spring 2025 Innovation Gap Fund competition, enabling continued customer discovery, product development, and technical de-risking. If you’d like to follow our progress or explore collaboration, connect with me or Applied Environmental Intelligence on LinkedIn and visit our website (https://environmentintel.com/) for updates.