About Us: Where We Came From
Numerica was born in the seat
of an ugly La-Z-Boy recliner
This is where it all started. In the belly of the Brown Bomber. Never underestimate the power of a humble rocking chair with synthetic upholstery to inspire greatness. The Brown Bomber reminds us that innovative companies often start as a single thought in the head of one person, but it takes the support of a talented team to transform that idea into a sustainable business. Numerica is the result of a small-town professor being told, “It can’t be done,” then surrounding himself with good people to prove the naysayers wrong. The Brown Bomber is proof that success happens when you sit back, relax, open your mind to possibility and recognize that you often find strength in numbers.
Development of Numerica’s core technology – the Multiple Frame Assignment (MFA) Tracking System – began in 1988 by Numerica founder Aubrey B. Poore, Ph.D., a professor of applied mathematics at Colorado State University (CSU) in Fort Collins. Aubrey and his team of dedicated and sleep-deprived graduate students wrote more than 70,000 lines of code, re-writing it from scratch seven times, before they got the MFA tracker right. The new technology improved the capability of surveillance systems by increasing tracking capacity, fidelity, maneuver detection, tracking accuracy and sensor data fusion. The award-winning and patented MFA tracker gained national attention, and was selected as a system upgrade to the AWACS military plane. This event was the springboard that launched our company’s growth.
With strong support from the CSU Research Foundation (CSURF), Numerica acquired patent rights to the MFA tracker from the university, giving us exclusive control of our flagship product.
In 2003, Numerica secured its first major licensing agreement with Spectrum Astro (now General Dynamics), which transitioned our MFA tracker to the Spectrum Astro-led team competing for the Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS) program. The revenue generated by this license provided Numerica with additional capital, allowing us to grow efficiently without incurring debt. And the rest, as they say, is history.