American soldiers will soon be training for modern warfare against drones built in Old Town.
TurbineOne, a defense technology company focused on artificial intelligence and drone software, opened its innovation hub T1MachineWorks on Thursday in Old Town’s airport business park.
The building, which is an empty warehouse with tall ceilings, will soon be used as a drone manufacturing facility. Materials will be brought in and made into drones, which will be tested in the building and then shipped to where they can be used.
TurbineOne focuses on building software that makes drones autonomous and viable on battlefields where remote control isn’t possible. The company is also manufacturing drones to test their attack software and train soldiers to defend against them.
Wars in Ukraine and Iran have shown that battlefields have evolved from bombing and trenches to drone warfare. TurbineOne secured a $98.9 million contract with the Department of Defense in 2025.
The new military technology will be tested in an unlikely location: a warehouse on the edge of the Old Town Municipal Airport, in a city best known for making canoes. The business opens at a time when city officials are attempting to flesh out industrial parks and vacant storefronts.
Attendees at Thursday’s ribbon cutting alluded to Maine’s military history, including Gettysburg hero Joshua Chamberlin and Bath Iron Works-built destroyers.
Software engineers and coders working for the company are spread across the country, and they are getting “really freaking good at autonomy,” Matt Amacker, chief technical officer of TurbineOne, said. TurbineOne’s programs run drones that detect, analyze and recognize different patterns on land and in the water, Amacker said.
To further innovate, the business needed a space to manufacture cheap drones to test their own programs and to send to the military for training, he said.
“We want to make sure that our military partners really know how all this stuff operates. With this, they can practice defending themselves, whereas before they weren’t able to touch them. If those drones cost them $6,000 a piece, they can’t take a pot shot,” Amacker said.
While normal attack drones can cost thousands, the innovation hub is already finding other materials to build with that can recreate the drones at a much lower cost, Amacker said. Although the company is based in Virginia and has not been in Maine for long, Amacker and others have already met with local stakeholders including the University of Maine, where he got an idea for manufacturing.
On a tour at the university Wednesday, Amacker spoke with someone about how wood pulp could possibly be used to create the body for a drone. That night, Amacker, who previously worked for Google, Amazon and Toyota, found an easily available version of wood pulp: paper towels.
Using paper towels as a form of paper mache, Amacker was able to build a drone fitted with wiring and blades for flying.
That insight, along with Maine’s history in defense manufacturing, the state’s seasons and availability of materials, is why the company decided to set up shop in Old Town, Amacker said.
“American technology should give [soldiers] every possible advantage, especially when the conditions aren’t perfect. TurbineOne builds technology for unforgiving environments. So naturally, we opened a facility in Maine,” Jamie De Coster, chief growth officer, said.
It’s unclear what the interior of the building and assembly line will look like or how many people will be employed, Amacker said, but it will be an upgrade from how the company was previously testing its technology.
To test software, a “drone tank” resembling a trampoline with a net over it was built in Amacker’s backyard, he said. The net would catch any drones that might go “haywire” while a software engineer shut it down. Now, the company will use the warehouse before getting licenses to do outdoor testing, Amacker said.
Although the company has gotten better at programming autonomous drones since it was founded in 2020, testing and finding more innovations is still key, Amacker said.
“It’s harder than you might think to get flocks of drones to work together, but we’ve got some innovative ways to make this much much easier. So we need to be able to test it out without blowing through $6,000 drones when they crash and don’t do the right thing,” Amacker said.