The Story of Phenix
Phenix - coined from "phenomics"- is the result of agricultural engineering applied to a major challenge in agriculture: efficiently collecting data on crop establishment and performance from hundreds of thousands of small plot field trials planted annually around the globe

This Is How We Started
2016
Need for Small Plot Tool Image Analysis Identified
2018
Purdue Ag-Celerator Program Graduation
2019
First commercial version launched
2021
Full support for multipsectral imaging systems

The original programming which became Plot Phenix was written by Anthony while a PhD student at Purdue University. Flying fixed-wing UAVs to map field trials in Professor Katy Rainey’s soybean breeding program, he realized that the existing tools for generating orthomosaics were inadequate and that he had a better idea. The resulting software was the core of an application by Anthony & Katy to Purdue Foundry’s Ag-Celerator™ startup program – a competition that they won. Progeny Drone began selling software in 2019, under license from Purdue Office of Technology Commercialization. Edwin joined the company in early 2020 after bumping into Katy -- a peer from grad school days at Cornell -- at a conference. He was quickly convinced that UAVs are now a mature technology for phenotyping -- even for those without technical computing skills. We have since built a rapidly-growing user base worldwide, while continuing to develop Phenix.