By Staff Report Saturday, February 28th, 2026

By L. Wayne Hicks

Special to the Business Times

The business of Trust Automation is looking up, literally. 

The San Luis Obispo company has secured a U.S. Air Force contract worth as much as $490 million for drone detection and drone mitigation systems, which has propelled Ty Safreno’s employee count skyward.

Safreno, who founded the company as a consulting business in 1990 with himself as the sole employee, now has a staff of about 170 people. Trust Automation expects to add another 70 this year. Last year, the employee head count hovered around 35 people. 

The company fills a need for smaller companies that may be good at developing technology but not at manufacturing, or vice versa. Trust Automation has the skillset to take a design and find the missing elements that make the technology production-worthy or user-ready, “and then we go into manufacturing and production on them,” Safreno said.

Safreno, who grew up in Pleasanton, studied at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The experience gave him a new trajectory.

“You got lucky sometimes, and I got medium lucky,” he said. “I went in as a civil engineer, hated it, and eventually found my way over to manufacturing engineering and loved it.”

Safreno left Cal Poly before graduating. He was already working full-time for a Bay Area tech company. “I was working and going to school versus going to school and working,” he said. 

But a nine-month stint working in the Northern California tech hub convinced him that he preferred the slower pace of San Luis Obispo. 

“I think it was a 21-mile commute that took me an hour and a half. Eighteen miles of it were at the speed limit of the freeway, and the last three miles were a parking lot, Safreno said.

Safreno returned to San Luis Obispo without a clear direction. He could have returned to Cal Poly. 

Instead, a series of referrals led him to start a consulting firm that initially centered on robotics and its role in automation.

“Back then, robots were going to change the world and all you had to do was buy a robot and say you’re going to get robots in your quarterly report,” Safreno said. “Investors were happy with you, but people were buying things and they weren’t doing anything near what they expected or planned it to be able to do. I’d say it has some parallels to the AI boom now. Everyone knows they need to say AI, but not everyone’s 100% sure how it’s supposed to integrate into their business.”

“Some people are integrating stuff that doesn’t make sense,” he said. “That’s the way robotics was back then. The company was founded on going out and helping people really determine the best to implement automation and robotics that would be successful — not just a cool piece of machinery that doesn’t do anything sitting in the corner of a factory.”

Safreno’s time at Cal Poly changed his life in another way as well. He befriended a finance student named Trudie, who was instrumental in getting Trust Automation going, and in 1997, married her. 

The couple has two sons: a junior in high school and a second-year student at Cal Poly studying manufacturing engineering. Trudie Safreno serves as CFO of Trust Automation and has steered the company’s contributions to the arts community.

Trust Automation was strictly a consultancy for its first five years. 

As word of mouth spread, Safreno’s consulting clients began seeking help with their products and the business shifted in that direction. As business has boomed over the years, Trust Automation has had to grow beyond its initial 1,100 square feet. 

Today, the company has a footprint of about 104,000 square feet. Part of the space is dedicated to a childcare center for the children of employees. 

The success of Trust Automation has enabled the Safrenos to invest in the community, including a $1 million gift that enabled the Performing Arts Center in San Luis Obispo to upgrade its plaza. 

They also helped finance the start of REACH, a regional economic action coalition, and the creation of an apprenticeship program in advanced manufacturing targeted at area high school students. 

“Ty and Trudie have paid for the first three years of this program to get it off the ground,” said Melissa James, president and CEO of REACH. “It’s going to really create opportunity for people, young people, that just did not exist before.” 

The Air Force contract awarded in August will enable Trust Automation to keep adding staff. 

The company won’t fly as high or as fast as the model of the Apollo Saturn V rocket that decorates Safreno’s office, but Trust Automation is certainly moving up. 

Part of the company’s work involves detecting a drone; what to do about it is the second half. Countermeasures of varying degrees can intercept a drone, capture it, or destroy it in the air. 

The Air Force contract is scheduled to run through August 2030.

“For the longest time in America, we didn’t think manufacturing was cool,” Safreno said, “and now we’ve come to the realization that it’s an essential part of keeping us healthy as a country.” 

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