What do museums and the defense sector have in common?

The spatial intelligence company Hidonix, it seems. The nascent Santa Monica-based tech platform, which was originally geared towards museums and schools, is now shifting its focus and joining dozens of companies that make up Los Angeles’ sprawling defense industry.

It’s a good time to join. The tech sector in Los Angeles received $8.71 billion in venture dollars in 2025, according to PitchBook. More than half of that money went to aerospace and defense companies. The sector is seeing more opportunities to nab defense contracts with the U.S. Department of War as global conflict escalates innovation.

However, Hidonix isn’t simply moving to where opportunity is, according to the company. Its technology – a combination of artificial intelligence, a proprietary geomagnetic engine and in-house hardware and software engineering – has led the company down many disparate paths.

“The transition from the commercial side to the defense side was much longer than just taking (advantage of) the momentum right now,” said Achille De Pasquale, Hidonix’s founder and chief executive.

A winding road

Hidonix’s story starts with Pasquale.

He spent the majority of his career building software like virtual reality applications for theme parks and video games. He founded Hidonix in 2020, after spending years being fixated on museums. Growing up in Italy, he saw where museums preserving 13th-century art, Roman ruins and Venice canals had extremely strict regulations over what could be updated. As a result, a lot of interactive and self-guided museum technology wasn’t being adopted.

“In Italy, museums are very old and they don’t allow you to install any hardware, any physical components that change the structure of the museum,” Pasquale said. “That was the moment I started the research and development of using the geomagnetic field of the building to create the navigation.”

Hidonix’s flagship product, Indoor Outdoor Navigation, or ION, is already used by hospitals, museums and convention centers.

A new application

The use cases for spatial intelligence, which allows people to visualize and track a physical space, may seem mundane. Westlake Village-based Occuspace uses similar technology to help college students determine if the library is too full to study in, for instance. But that technology has use cases ranging from useful in everyday life to critical in high-risk scenarios.

Hidonix’s spatial intelligence technology ended up being useful for schools, which could use the platform for security protocols. The platform, called SafeSchool, can keep track of wandering kindergarteners, monitor suspicious persons on campus, and even evacuate students and staff safely during an active shooting incident.

“There was a transition period whereby we realized that these technologies that we could use for the schools could be actually applied to other sensitive targets,” said Paolo Casarella, Hidonix’s chief financial officer. “And that is what led us to move into more of the defense and security space.”

In 2025, as a succession of wars around the globe motivated the U.S. to develop updated aerospace, military and intelligence hardware and software, companies were forced to confront the limitations of existing technology and innovate beyond that. Spatial intelligence has long been used on the battlefield to guide situational awareness and track precise targets.

Stories like Hidonix’s, whereby a company sets out to focus on one industry and pivots or expands into others, are not uncommon. YouTube was originally conceived as a video-based dating site. HexClad, which was founded in Santa Monica, pivoted from manufacturing juicers to cookware.

“I think (this business model) provides us with an added value, and the added value is having a revenue stream that is recurring and safe and growing, which gives a basis of stability,” said Casarella “And on the other hand, (we are) having a lot of upside in the defense space. It can bring big contracts and big opportunities. It’s also something that challenges you all the time.”