About Orion Labs
Orion Labs, founded in 2019, is a woman owned small business in rural Nunn, Colorado focused on sensing technologies. Orion Labs won the NASA TechLeap competition and has completed two (2022 & 2023) successful suborbital flights detecting dams using quantum machine learning. Orion Labs also completed an NSF Phase 1 and NSF I-Corp (2022) and developed a safety sensing system for obstacle detection and avoidance for robotic applications. Orion Labs completed submissions for the Department of Transportation’s Intersection Safety Challenge and was awarded Phase 1A (2024) and Phase 1B (2025) awards for the developed software to analyze multi-modal conflict data by detecting road users, localizing road users, predicting future travel paths, and predicting collisions. Orion Labs has supported four commercial customers through consulting in the areas of machine learning safety and robotics integrations. Orion Labs brings expertise in sensing solutions, machine learning, electronics, robotics, earth observation and autonomy.
Our Team
Sara Jennings, CEO
Sara Jennings has over a decade of experience managing complex technical projects and leading technical teams. Sara has a diverse background and previously worked designing and running multi million dollar prize competitions at XPRIZE including operations for the Qualcomm tricorder XPRIZE, worked in the space industry, running large events including chairing NewSpace conferences (NewSpace 2014, NewSpace Portugal & NewSpace Europe) and ran a machine learning lab in partnership with NASA managing 40 PhDs and Post Docs and partnerships including Google Cloud, IBM, Intel, Lockheed Martin and NVIDIA. Sara Jennings also worked at CU Boulder’s Research and Innovation Office as a Program Manager. Sara ran the new venture competition for student lead innovations in 2020.
Orion Labs, under her leadership, has won awards from the NASA TechLeap Challenge, NASA Space Robotics Phase 2 competition, DOT’s Intersection Challenge Phase 1A & 1B, NSF SBIR and Phase 1 of the Counting Every Drop Challenge. Sara Jennings Founded Orion Labs in 2019 and started working full time operating the company in 2021.
Education: B.A. Linguistics University of Arizona, M.S. Organizational Leadership CU Boulder
Brian Jennings, CTO
Brian Jennings is the CTO of Orion Labs. Brian has a background in leading technical teams and building high tech products. At Orion Labs, Brian has developed a safety system for mobile robotic applications, built a suborbital payload and supported our customer Formant with robotic support. Brian previously worked at Left Hand Robotics which was acquired by Toro as the Director/Senior Manager of Robotics Engineering. Brian Jennings also recently worked with Formant helping build their customer’s robotic capabilities for telepresence robotic applications.
Brian Jennings led the technical submission for the Department of Transportation’s Intersection Safety Challenge from the design and development of the Intersection Safety System called Saiph, led the extrinsic and intrinsic sensor calibrations and led the algorithm development and deployment for detection, localization and path prediction making his experience well suited for the near collision analysis. Brian Jennings has worked for Orion Labs since 2022.
Education: B.S. Aerospace Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, M.S. Electrical Engineering, University of Southern California