About Aetheris
Course intelligence for golf. Measured, not guessed.
We fly golf courses and turn one survey into the data a course runs on — sunlight, turf, water and terrain — for the superintendents, managers and head pros who make the calls.
What we do
One capture. Everything downstream.
A golf course is a living asset, and most of the decisions about it — which trees come down, where the water goes, what next season’s budget should be — are still made by eye. Aetheris exists to put measured data behind those calls.
It starts with a single survey flight. From that one capture we build the measured base map of the whole course (Atlas), model the sun across every green (shade analysis), map where water collects and runs, draw the greens book, cut the course tour and flythroughs, and load it all into Cortex — the software your team runs the course from. One flight, one source of truth, every department.
Everything is measured from our own survey, not traced from old satellite imagery — which is the difference between a green read to the centimeter and one guessed to a few meters.
How we operate
Data first. Honest always.
We don’t deliver photo dumps. Every deliverable is built from measurement — a surface model, a sun model, a measured map — and it has to hold up when a board member, a green committee or an architect asks how we know.
We’re just as clear about what the data can’t do. Our maps are measured for planning and management, not a boundary survey. When a question needs a different sensor, a soil test or a second flight, we’ll say so rather than stretch the data to fit.
Survey, not satellite
Your course, measured on your timeline.
Satellite and fixed-wing imagery is captured when the provider flies, at resolutions that can’t resolve the detail of a putting surface. By the time it reaches you, the course has grown in, been renovated or lost a tree.
We survey your course when it matters — before a tree meeting, ahead of a renovation, each season if you want the trend — and deliver data you can measure from, not just look at.
I built Aetheris because the people who run golf courses make big, expensive decisions with very little hard data. The same drone platforms, photogrammetric processing and thermal analytics that large operators use to manage their assets can measure a course to the centimeter — and that should be within reach of every superintendent, manager and pro, not just the biggest clubs.
I’ve spent my career in the Testing, Inspection, and Certification industry and commercial construction — work where precision isn’t optional and the data has to hold up when someone challenges it. That background shaped how I think about every deliverable that leaves our pipeline: if it’s not measured, verified, and defensible, it doesn’t ship.
What drives me is pretty simple. I care about quality — obsessively. I believe in technology as a force multiplier for the people doing real work. And I value relationships built on trust, not transactions. Every course we work with is a partnership, and I take that seriously.
I’m a lifetime resident of Southwest Missouri, and Aetheris is built here — from the survey flights to the software.
“Every course has a story in its data — where the sun falls, where the water goes, what a tree really costs. My job is to measure it and hand it to the people who run the course.”
Dylan holds FAA Part 107 certification and operates a DJI Matrice 4T with Emlid RTK positioning, processing through Pix4D and our own golf analysis pipeline.
Equipment
Survey-grade hardware, software we built for golf.
- DJI Matrice 4TMulti-sensor enterprise sUAS — wide RGB, medium-tele RGB, radiometric thermal, and laser rangefinder in a single payload.
- Emlid Reach RS2+ RTK baseRTK positioning so every map, green and measurement ties to real-world coordinates.
- Pix4D Mapper + CloudPhotogrammetric processing — the aerial map, surface model and 3D mesh everything else is built on.
- Cortex, Atlas + our golf pipelineOur own software: the shade and turf models, the greens book and tour builders, and the Cortex app your team uses every day.
Where we work
Based in Southwest Missouri. Built for courses anywhere.
We fly courses across the region from our Cassville base, and travel for courses beyond it — quoted with travel included. The software and data work wherever your course is.