The Monthly Beat - May '25 Edition
A recap of the most interesting Pittsburgh tech news from the past few weeks and upcoming local tech events.
Good morning!
I know, I know. I’m late again with the post. Things have been super busy for me lately, so sorry to keep you all waiting, but I figured better late than never!
Let’s get into it.
What Happened This Past Month
The Big Story
Aurora Launches Fully Driverless Commercial Trucking
After 8 years of development and having overcome several regulatory hurdles, Pittsburgh-based driverless trucking company Aurora has finally gotten its fully driverless trucks making round trips between Dallas and Houston, Texas without any humans in the cab. The trucks have completed over 1,200 miles without drivers to-date, and the company plans to expand service to El Paso, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona by the end of the year.
Since this new broke, Aurora cofounder Sterling Anderson has announced his departure from the company, citing a new job offer at “an iconic global company”, which is somewhat vague, but hey, good for him? He was at Aurora for 8 years and felt it was the right time for him to bow out given that “the technology is on the road, the team is in place to scale it, and the momentum [Aurora has] created in the industry is palpable.”
That said, it’s honestly so encouraging to see a Pittsburgh company pull off a product as wildly complex as a driverless truck. So congrats to all involved!
The Headlines
Pittsburgh businesses are starting to feel the effects of both tariffs and funding cuts at the hands of the federal government. Several local startup founders recently shared the specific ways these changes are affecting them, including delayed investments and supply chain difficulties, while CMU is suing to block National Science Foundation (NSF) funding cuts. Pitt also “saw five of its NSF grants canceled last month, totaling $1.7 million.”
While other sectors may be feeling a funding pinch, military funding seems to be going strong. Near Earth Autonomy landed a couple of big contracts with the military this past month. The first is for delivering “miniaturized autonomy systems for U.S. Marines.” These systems, code-named “Fireflies,” are able to autonomously deliver supplies to troops in difficult-to-reach areas because of their small size. The second contract is to create a system to enable, well, self-flying Blackhawks. Feels like something straight out of Call of Duty.
Speaking of military funding, Gecko Robotics announced a new “extended reality” product that captures and combines thousands of images to generate a 3D model of an aircraft. These 3D models allow teams to not only remotely assess aircraft maintenance needs, but also reveal defects that may be obscured from human eyes. Gecko is now working with defense contractor L3Harris to make the product available to various U.S. military customers.
The founder of local smart baseball tech company Diamond Kinetics, CJ Handron, was featured in the Technical.ly podcast, and it’s a solid watch/listen! He talks about how the company got started, how their baseball bat sensor product has evolved, what’s been up lately, and what’s next for the company.
Last but not least, NEXTPittsburgh published a great mini profile of local tech community leader Kashif Henderson. Henderson has been promoting digital literacy locally by fervently working to develop educational and internship programs for local students. Thanks to Henderson’s work, students have been able to shadow IT professionals at Pitt, learn the Python programming language, and develop soft skills to help them in future tech careers. Henderson was named NEXTPittsburgh’s CIO of the Year in the “Tech Community Impact” category, and you can check out the other local award winners in the article as well.
For the Days Ahead
THIS WEEKEND, May 14th-27th, PyCon, the Python programming language conference, is back in Pittsburgh. Register here.
Also on Wednesday, May 14th, Dr. Rorry Brenner will be presenting on his Perforated Backpropagation deep learning algorithm at Steel City AI Innovators. Sign up here.
Wednesday, May 21st, AMA Pittsburgh is hosting its monthly Coffee Connections event on at COhatch Shadyside. The topic this month will be “What Every Website Needs in 2025 (and what you’ll regret ignoring)” presented by Benjamin Kostenbader of Dot Foundry. I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Ben present at other events, and he rocks. You should go. Sign up here.
AI@Work continues to be my absolute favorite local recurring tech event, and we got another one coming up June 12th. At this past month’s event, we discussed the latest developments in AI agents, Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the merits and pitfalls of “vibe coding.” If you’re an AI builder and interested in joining, sign up here!
JuliaCon, the Julia programming language conference, will be in Pittsburgh July 21–26th. Tickets are on sale here.
Are you having trouble making time to get out of the house to some of these cool events? Check out Confirmed, a locally owned and developed time manager/scheduler app. Plans start at $5/month for a single user, and you can get your first month free with offer code
techbeat!
That’s all for now. Next month, I promise I’ll be trying harder to be punctual with this post, and also trying to drum up some additional summer reading for you all. Also, if you see me at one of these events, feel free to say hello, and would love to hear from you in the comments if you have an event you’d like me to include in a future post. Thanks, and have a great rest of your weekend!
—Austin