Nine months after announcing plans to exit most of its operations in Florida, the MIT spinoff on Thursday unveiled new plans to open a St. Petersburg tech facility next month serving Special Operations Command, or SOCom, at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa.
The 20,000-square-foot facility, based on Blue Heron Boulevard near Roosevelt Boulevard, will start with 20 employees, with 50 likely by late 2017. Its mission will be to help expedite military advanced technology from blueprint to the battlefield, a process Draper calls “rapid prototyping.”
Draper’s specialty is to commercialize advanced technology, then license its work off to others to handle manufacturing.
