When that company was acquired, he worked for a time with the Air Force Civil Engineer Center at Andrews Air Force Base, but he found he missed the fast pace of private industry.

This past June, Paladino returned to the start-up world, working as a customer success manager at Orbital Insight, a firm that uses geolocation information—like cell phone pings and GPS data—in combination with vision data and other software to provide location, behavior and usage analytics for commercial and government clients.

“We have geolocation data that can tell you the volume of people in any given area at any point in time—information that could be valuable to someone considering opening a business in the area or planning for a large event,” says Paladino. “We work with businesses interested in people’s behavior patterns before and after the onset of the pandemic. We can track supply chains. Basically, we can use our fusion of data sources to create a full snapshot of site intelligence or facility monitoring.”

When not working, Paladino can often be found flying his drone, a Phantom4QuadCopter. “Exploring new areas to capture images has been a great way to explore the greater D.C. area,” he says.

By Renée Gearhart Levy