Fennec Engineering is a functional safety company founded by engineers who have spent their careers solving complex safety challenges. ASAP, the Advanced Safety Acceleration Program, combines software, physical testing, and expert guidance into one system, taking safety-critical products from hazard analysis to a defensible safety case.
ASAP was built by functional safety engineers who understand what it takes to design, assess, and defend the safety of autonomous systems. We built the software from that experience, embedding functional safety expertise into the way the platform works. This is not software developers learning functional safety. It is functional safety engineers building software around the workflow they know firsthand.
ASAP is for the people responsible for functional safety: the teams designing autonomous systems, the engineers who sign off on them, and the leaders who have to stand behind the product’s safety case. When a machine goes into the world and someone has to defend that decision to an assessor, regulator, customer, or legal team, the work needs to be more than complete. It needs to be defensible.
Every decision is traceable from hazard to requirement to test, grounded in the right standards and backed by evidence that a third party can follow, scrutinize, and trust.
Because safety is not just about proving that a system works. It is about being able to show, with confidence and clarity, why it is safe to deploy and having the evidence to stand behind that decision.
Our purpose is to give people confidence in the systems they bring into the world.
BACKGROUND
ASAP was built inside one of the world's most demanding robotics programs, at Amazon Robotics, and used to take real autonomous systems through functional safety under real deadlines.
In 2025, ASAP was licensed out for wider use. Today it runs at teams building some of the most complex autonomous systems in the market.
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We make the safety process clear. We do not pretend the work is trivial. No tool does the thinking for you, and any that claims to is selling you a liability. Good tooling removes the friction that has nothing to do with engineering judgment, so the judgment gets the attention it deserves.
"The software recommended it" is not a defense anyone wants to give. Every AI-assisted step in ASAP is drafted for a human to verify, then traced and recorded. The person accountable for a decision stays the person who made it.
ASAP serves teams of every size. For smaller teams, it provides built-in functional safety expertise. For larger organizations, it delivers the consistency that keeps parallel teams working from the same source of truth.
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We build for the people whose decisions carry real consequences.
We earn trust through transparency, evidence, and engineering discipline.
We bring structure to complexity so critical decisions can be made on evidence, not instinct.
We help every engineer build the safety expertise their role demands, regardless of team size or experience level.
We believe getting safety right is what earns autonomous systems the trust to scale.
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Chairman & Founder
View credentialsI take all the credit for the good work that everyone else does.
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Chief Product Officer
View credentialsLeads the product organization, overseeing end-to-end product strategy, development, and lifecycle.
Certified Functional Safety Engineer
Safety-certified the world's largest robotic fleet
Holds 9 patents in robotics and autonomy
20 years across aerospace, defense, and technology industries
Principal Functional Safety Engineer, Amazon Robotics
System Safety Engineer, Lockheed Martin
M.S. Safety Science, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
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VP of Technology
View credentialsDrives technology strategy and execution across Fennec's physical and virtual AI systems.
4+ years in energy storage systems, with a broader background in control and optimization, hardware-software integration, and AI deployments
Principal Engineer, Acculon Energy
Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University
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VP of Finance and Administration
View credentialsOversees day-to-day business operations and financial strategy.
15 years across software/technology, including testing, inspection, and certification (TIC), and life sciences
FP&A, corporate finance, and private equity
B.S. Business (Finance), Miami University
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Director of Product and Functional Safety Engineer
View credentialsOwns the ASAP product, making sure it helps customers certify their autonomous systems faster.
Certified Functional Safety Engineer (CFSE), TÜV Rheinland, IEC 61508
7 years in functional safety, 5 years in product, across AMRs, humanoids, and machinery workcells
Solutions Engineer, IBM
Functional Safety Engineer, Reynolds and Moore
B.S. Mechanical Engineering
M.S. Systems Engineering, University of Texas at Dallas
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Director of Programs
View credentialsOwns delivery across the ASAP platform, from resourcing and roadmap planning through customer-facing program management.
~29 years across engineering and enterprise software, spanning automotive manufacturing, manufacturing ERP/SaaS, and safety-critical robotics software
Director of Release Management, Plex Systems
Earlier roles at Metaldyne and American Axle & Manufacturing
BEng (Hons) Mechanical Engineering, Brunel University
Fennec's specified ASAP tools are qualified by TÜV Rheinland as Tool Class 2 (T2) offline support tools under IEC 61508-3:2010, Clause 7.4.4. The qualification applies only to the tools and versions named in the corresponding reports.
Meet the team
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Functional Safety Architect
Joe has spent his career on the hardest problems in robotics, automation, and functional safety, from autonomous mobile robots and safety-critical software to industrial automation and systems architecture. He also helps write the rules: he contributes to the international ISO working groups for machinery safety and driverless industrial trucks.
“Safety should be an integral part of engineering, not an obstacle at the end of development.”
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Director of Sales
Ross DeLisle runs sales at Fennec. Prior to joining Fennec, Ross spent nearly eight years in safety software, helping enterprise organizations improve their environmental, health, and safety programs through technology. His background spans enterprise sales, strategic account management, and commercial leadership, with a focus on helping complex organizations adopt software that improves safety, compliance, and operational processes.
“What drew me to Fennec is their commitment to replacing manual, fragmented processes with an AI-powered, full-lifecycle platform. We aren’t just checking boxes, we’re helping innovators certify their technology and move the industry forward safely.”
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Associate Product Manager
Avery turns what safety engineers need into features the team can build. That means writing the specs and tickets, working with engineers to get the details right, and writing the docs and announcements that help customers get the most out of ASAP. Avery also builds internal tools that make everyday work faster for the whole team.
“The best features start with listening to the people who use them.”
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Principal System Architect
Clayton will help shape how ASAP Testing architecture scales as Fennec grows, serving industries that are themselves changing rapidly as technology moves from the lab into the real world.
“Fennec helps innovators move faster without compromising safety. That momentum is what excites me most as we expand into physical test spaces.”
A functional safety company staffed by engineers who design, assess and defend the safety of autonomous systems. That experience is built into ASAP, the software and test-cell program Fennec Engineering sells. The people who write the tools are the people who have had to produce the evidence.
Before the architecture is fixed, if you can. Safety decisions are cheapest while the hardware and software choices are still open. Teams more often arrive with an assessment date already set. That's workable. It just leaves fewer options.
No. ASAP is built for the safety engineers you already have, and it replaces manual traceability with traceability an assessor can follow. Builders, integrators, operators and safety engineers each need the same evidence from a different side of the supply chain.
No. A certificate describes a system at one moment. Machines keep shipping software after that, so the safety case has to stay current with what's deployed today. That is what Fennec Engineering builds for. The assessment day is one date inside it.
Fennec Engineering is headquartered at 2 Miranova Place, Suite 390, Columbus, Ohio 43215, United States.
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The systems being built now, robots that move through shared spaces and AI that decides on its own, are only as deployable as the confidence behind them. Earned honestly, that confidence stops being a brake on progress and becomes what lets it happen.
If you are responsible for functional safety, or for standing behind a deployment, we should talk.
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