An app studio in Delaware, Ohio
Found Ground Labs makes useful apps for people who like to explore: in the fields, in the woods and beyond. Our first app helps artifact hunters find good ground. More apps for nature lovers, explorers and collectors are on the way.
Products and projects
Coming soon · iPhone and Android · Ohio first
For surface hunters. First Rise scores nearly 250,000 crop fields across all 88 Ohio counties for the setting where people camped: a feeder creek, a dry rise above the water, and recorded sites nearby. Then it shows the ground underneath, with LiDAR views, soil maps, a flint guide and a hunting forecast, and prints a permission letter for the landowner.
Visit firstrise.app
Working prototype
A home weather system built around a Tempest backyard weather station. It combines the station's own readings with radar and forecast models to give a morning weather briefing on your phone, rain and lightning alerts, a live radar map, and local forecasts that it checks against what actually happened. It also covers the night sky, and in winter it estimates the odds of a school delay.
In testing
For metal detectorists and history buffs: finding old farmsteads and home sites that have disappeared from today's maps, using historic maps and LiDAR.
On the drawing board
We have more ideas for exploring, learning about and enjoying the outdoors, and for useful everyday tools beyond it. Have an idea, or a problem an app could solve? We'd like to hear it.
How we work
Many of our ideas start outside, in nature, on the land and in the field. Some will simply be useful tools for everyday life.
We start from trusted public sources, such as maps, elevation, soils and records, and do the hard work of making them easy to use.
Our apps encourage asking permission, following the law and leaving places as you found them.
About
Found Ground Labs LLC was started in 2026 by Adam Brandemihl, MD, a physician in Delaware, Ohio, who spends his free time outdoors. It began with one question from his own hobby, which fields are worth walking for arrowheads, and the answer became First Rise.
The name says what we enjoy most: going out, looking closely, and finding something worth finding. That applies to a lot more than arrowheads, and our next apps will show it.
Questions, ideas, or interest in working together? We would like to hear from you.
adam@foundgroundlabs.com