Company
Our method began at a fighter wing
THE EDGE COMPANY is an Italian deep-tech company, founded in Rimini in 2017. We build artificial intelligence that sees what moves in safety-critical spaces, day and night, where no one can watch all the time.
- Founded
- 2017
- Designed and built in
- Rimini, Italy
- Led by
- Fabio Masci, Lead Executive Officer
- US patent
- Method of detecting moving objects, January 2025
1998 to 2017
A fighter pilot who ran flight safety
Fabio Masci is a retired Italian Air Force lieutenant colonel and fighter pilot. From 1998 to 2008 he ran flight safety at the 5th Fighter Wing, in Cervia. In 1999 he set up its bird and FOD team, the Nucleo FOD e Avifauna.
In 2003 he was among the first four Italian pilots sent to the United States for the F-16 program, and became an F-16 instructor. He flew in four operations, from the Balkans to Libya. From 2008 he ran flight safety at the Tactical Leadership Programme, in Belgium and then in Albacete.
The idea came before the company
He left active duty in 2015. That year the idea for a bird monitoring system took shape with the University of Verona's computer science department.
A bird monitoring patent was filed in Italy in November 2016. He founded THE EDGE COMPANY in Rimini in 2017 with a small group of partners, and leads it.
Flight hours on fast jets, about
2,500
Our history
Three lines of work, then one focus
Augmented reality
Paused to focus
Light aircraft
Paused to focus
Bird monitoring
In 2017 we started with three lines of work, all in aviation.
One was an augmented-reality proof of concept for pilot training, another a light-aircraft line, Aero. The third, there from the start, was BCMS® (Bird Control Monitoring System). Aero was paused after a year of work, so that we could focus.
The augmented-reality work found another use: by May 2019 we had delivered three apps to a museum in Venice. In 2020 we chose to concentrate on BCMS®, and paused the augmented-reality line, MAESTRO, to do so. We no longer work only in aviation.
Three disciplines, joined in one method
Each circle, drawn over Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, is a discipline we practice ourselves.
- Knowledge by experience
- Computer vision
- Artificial intelligence
After Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man.
Knowledge by experience
Our knowledge comes from flight safety and from the field. We survey each site, supervise the installation, commission the system, and support it remotely. Biologists in our data analysis team validate samples of the detections and review the reports that go to customers.
Computer vision
We work with pan-tilt-zoom daylight and thermal cameras, so the watch continues after dark. We hold a US patent for a method of detecting moving objects, invented by Fabio Masci. Every site starts on a pretrained model, and we retrain it on that site's own annotated footage.
Artificial intelligence
We build neural networks that classify moving objects from their appearance and their movement. We run them on servers normally placed at the site, with no cloud service. Every figure in our reports traces back to a stored event.
Where the three circles meet, a flight-safety method becomes a system that keeps watch when people cannot.
From a first prize in 2017 to a paper in Naples
Programs, recognitions, and patents
First prize at Nuove Idee Nuove Imprese, the business plan competition of Romagna and San Marino.
Selected for Climb Season 2, the acceleration program of The Camp, in Aix-en-Provence.
Best Presentation Award at the International Venture Academy of Sophia Business Angels.
Joined NVIDIA Inception.
Audience prize at the Startup Competition of the Web Marketing Festival, in Rimini.
Excelsa Romagna Award from Confindustria Romagna, in the innovation category, an award for the association's member companies.
US patent granted for the bird monitoring system, invented by Fabio Masci (US 10,956,741 B2).
Selected for the San Francisco phase of Call4Innovit, the SMEs Traction program of INNOVIT, the Italian Innovation and Culture Hub.
Partner of the ROME Digital Hub, funded by Italy's National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR M4C2, Investimento 2.3, MIMIT).
US patent granted for a method of detecting moving objects, invented by Fabio Masci.
Working with regulators
A listed participant in EASA's rulemaking group on AI trustworthiness (RMT.0742).
A seat, since October 2024, in EASA's expert group on safety-related aerodrome equipment (RMT.0161).
THE EDGE COMPANY works with EASA, under an Innovation Partnership Contract signed in 2025, on a concept of operations for BCMS® at aerodromes.
In public
Fabio Masci presented field results at the Italian Ornithology Congress in Lecce, on an abstract written with our data analysis team.
A paper by Fabio Masci and the data analysis team, presented at the Wildlife Strike International Conference in Naples, organized by ENAC.
Our method is still the one from flight safety
We started with the airspace, and today we also work on wind farms and at industrial sites. Like airports, they are regulated, safety-critical environments where operators answer for what moves around them.
The map of our installations is on bcms.ai, another site.
Airports
Wind farms
Industrial sites
What we build today
The product has a site of its own
Our one product today is BCMS®, an AI optical detection platform made for the environments where we work. It is designed and built in Rimini, and bcms.ai tells its story in full.
The people behind the method work in small groups
Research and development, data analysis, and operations each have a group, and every group reports to the Lead Executive Officer.
We don't hire people. We forge alliances with brilliant minds.
Write to us
Tell us who you are and what you need, and the person who can answer will write back.