Ep 08 - David Morczinek: Machine Learning at MIT to Entrepreneurial Growth and Fundraising Success.
Episode Summary
David Morczinek, CEO of Airworks, discusses his journey from aerospace engineering at Airbus to co-founding a geospatial AI company at MIT. He explains how Airworks uses computer vision to analyze aerial data from drones, satellites, and aircraft, pivoting from pure automation to a hybrid service model when customers struggled with AI adoption. The conversation covers fundraising progression from friends-and-family to private equity, balancing technical innovation with market readiness, and building a sustainable company culture.
Key Quotes
"We realized pretty quickly that there was too much of a depth change from going from 100% manual to 100% automated. We decided we can capture more value if we help the industry get there by layering on services as quality control."
"The best business is one that hires two or three people and turns that into a $50 billion company. But AI is expensive—you need a lot of data, processing power. The problem we're solving cannot be solved without AI."
"Building a company is a marathon. I took a conscious decision that if I'm not in the right shape mentally and stable in life, I won't be able to do this for the next five to ten years."
Transcript
Hi welcome to Tales From The Sky Lounge. It's a podcast about business consulting and venture investing. We get out there in the world and we talk to people who are making it happen in the tech industry and we get their stories.
So today in the Sky Lounge we have David Moraté. Hi David, welcome to the Sky Lounge.
Hey Todd, great to be here, excited about this conversation.
Awesome. Well David, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and how you came to be CEO at Airworks?
Yeah, absolutely. So today I'm obviously CEO of Airworks, which is a geospatial AI company. We analyze aerial data of any sort—aircraft data, drone data, satellite data, even LIDAR data—and convert that into intelligence for businesses to take better decisions. This is pretty close to my background. I've always been an aerospace guy. I actually went to school to study aerospace engineering in Europe, in Germany. I was always fascinated about planes and how they connect cultures, how they allow people to meet each other all around the world, and how they allow us to consume goods from all different places in the world. So I really wanted to just learn more about aviation and flying and became an engineer.
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