PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 A cutting-edge Philadelphia startup got some high level attention when it hosted visitors from the Trump administration on Tuesday.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Less than six months ago, the company Albacore was headquartered in the kitchen of co-founder John Huddleston. Now it occupies a large space that used to be Colonial Marble and Granite in South Philadelphia and has a defense contract for unmanned underwater vehicles.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey went out of business and so we purchased the factory, converted it into a drone submarine manufacturing facility here,\u201d said Huddleston, showing off the place to Small Business Administration head Kelly Loeffler and a U.S. Department of Defense official.<\/p>\n
Loeffler said federal officials were there to highlight the fact that 70% of the defense industrial base are small businesses like Albacore.<\/p>\n
\u201cPrivate sector innovators, entrepreneurs that are taking risks to build for America, create jobs and secure our national security,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Huddleston said he began Albacore because he saw U.S. capability lagging as drones became more important weapons. He says Albacore will put the country in the lead underwater.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can go over a thousand nautical miles and we can stay undersea for over 30 days,\u201d he said, \u201cthat\u2019s 10 to 20 times better than anything else that\u2019s existed to date.\u201d<\/p>\n
His partner, Dante Visbort, said they built the prototype just 14 months ago in Huddleston\u2019s kitchen.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have basically the shrunk down version of what was used in WWII but in a mass-produceable, autonomous form,\u201d he explained. \u201cYou can use them for long-range persistent intelligence or you can use them for a strike.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Huddleston said the drones also have peaceful uses. \u201cWe are gathering data that is also useful for the progress of science and understanding our climate change,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Albacore currently has 25 employees but Huddleston said they plan to triple that, with a goal of churning out a thousand underwater drones a year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) \u2014 A cutting-edge Philadelphia startup got some high level attention when it hosted visitors from…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1024441,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[5132],"tags":[5229,5755,1448,2830,1311,20879,11590,819,67,586,132,5230,68,2969],"class_list":["post-1024440","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-philadelphia","tag-america","tag-drones","tag-pa","tag-pennsylvania","tag-philadelphia","tag-small-business-administration","tag-south-philadelphia","tag-startup","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/117159627959289885","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024440","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1024440"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1024440\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1024441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1024440"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1024440"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1024440"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}