3 promising UK-based drone startups that are raising money today
Drones and other kinds of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles have forever captured the imagination of people, and are always seen in futuristic stories swarming and patrolling our skies on the lookout for things to do. With this promise coming true in the last few years, investment has indeed been kicking up — Crunchbase research mentions that total investment in drone startups has reached $1.76 billion dollars since 2011, with $500 million of that in 2017.
In my August 2017 investment themes report on computer vision I wrote about UAV navigation as a large nascent market that is recently emerging out of the ability for machines to see.
“Robots and AVs will soon be all around us, and we will interact with them as much as we interact with our screens today. The IEEE estimates that 75% of all vehicles will be fully autonomous by 2040. Goldman Sachs predicts that $100 Billion will be spent on drones up until 2020, from which 70B is military and 13B is for commercial and civil use. After finding different applications in military, drones are now moving more into the commercial market with use cases that range from delivery to inspection”
Indeed autonomy and automation are today the name of the (drone) game. Here are a few of the latest milestones in terms of investment:
Skydio announced $42M of investment in its series B from IVP, Accel, Andreesen Horrowitz, NVIDIA and others and the launch of The Skydio R1, an autonomous drone that flies and follows its subject/owner without hitting obstacles.
Aerobotics raised two rounds of $32.5M in November 2017 led by BluRun Ventures China and Microsoft Ventures, then $10M in January 2018 through crowdsfunding. It provides the hardware and software for fully automated UAV flight for industrial applications such as inspection, security and monitoring. The company provides a software platform for facility staff to create and launch missions.
Iris Automation closed an $8 million first round of funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners with a computer vision-based collision avoidance systems for industrial UAVs. The company is working towards a “situational awareness” platform that can guide drones and other forms of autonomous air transport safely from A to B.
Altitude Angel announced a $4.5m Series A round led by the Seraphim Space Fund, with participation from Accelerated Digital Ventures. The startup works on airspace integration and a drone management platform, and has a long-term goal to use its platform to enable millions of autonomous drones to fly — safely — without any human pilots.
PrecisionHawk has raised $75 million in a round of funding led by Third Point Ventures. The company is working on a cross-industry aerial data platform that provides everything from hardware to software and insights
Kespry has raised $33 million in a series C round of funding led by G2VP. It provides industries such as mining, insurance and construction with an automated system that uses UAVs to capture and process imagery of sites from above.
DroneBase closed a $12 million Series B funding round co-led by Upfront Ventures and Union Square Ventures. is a startup that connects drone users with commercial missions and is also working on a new augmented reality enterprise tool that the company hopes will get pro users a birds-eye view of 3D models.
So now that we have an idea about the evolution of the drone market in the last few months, we should ask the question “What’s the future of drones?” The slide below from the CBinsights drone market report gives us a few hints.
Now on to our 3 startups and why I think they are important players in the future of drones (and robotics/IoT). One is working on autonomy, another is working on swarming and the third is working on mapping.
1)Perceptual Robotics
Going against Airobotics and DJI as an autonomy tech provider is not an easy task. Yet the drone inspection market is big enough for a startup such as Perceptual Robotics from Bristol, UK to enter in a vertically integrated way and win it case by case. The first application that Perceptual Robotics is automating the inspection of wind turbines. The company, out of the Bristol Robotics lab, have built a full-stack autonomous tech platform for inspecting wind turbine blades for erosion, delamination and cracks, with the help of computer vision.
Today, most of wind turbine inspection happens by people climbing a rope, using ground cameras, or a trained person operating a manual drone. Their product — called Dhalion — can do the same thing autonomously, without any input from humans, cutting costs by 50–75% and job time by 33–66%.
The company is then providing both autonomy and automation, for faster and cheaper way to inspect. In my computer vision report, I highlighted this point:
“Because vision software can identify patterns in pixels and divergences from them, they can be used in B2B to ensure quality and inspect for faulty objects. Cameras can effectively do the job of human inspectors, diagnosticians and QAs. There are widespread predictions today that automation will prevail in the next few decades and that consequences may include big improvements in productivity and efficiency.”
Perceptual robotics is a perfect example of a company making that happen and getting early traction with heavy asset manufacturers and operators, while still in the research lab. Inspection trials are set to launch starting April, and the company is now raising a pre-seed round to help undergo these trials and prove their tech to the big clients. Most importantly, their inspection flight path solution is designed to be easily adaptable to other markets such as oil pipelines as well as solar panels, and is currently being filed for patent protection.
2)Accelerated Dynamics
Regardless of the form factor — be it air delivery vehicles, micro bee-drones or self-flying transportation — we will need those UAVs to swarm and communicate with each other in real time to achieve certain missions. Imagine an inspection of a of a solar farm is needed, it is not efficient to send one drone at a time, or to have many drones each doing its thing. It is much more efficient that these drones work together, in an intelligent and optimized manner, to cover the whole area continuously and in the fastest way possible. When drones swarm they leave no gaps and create no redundancies or collisions.
Here’s a passage from my report that makes things more interesting:
“Due to the benefits of continuous capture and sense-making, we can start to imagine how much more “pixel data” from the real world we will want to collect in the hopes to find problems and solutions that could not be seen before by the regular human eye. We will add more cameras everywhere around us in our homes and on our cars, and drones will complement ground cameras from above. Drones can monitor public spaces and deliver products fast to whoever needs them. LDV capital estimates that there will be 44 Billion cameras watching the world by 2022, up from 14 Billion today. Kevin Kelly, Founder of WIRED, talks in his book “The Inevitable” about total tracking and surveillance as an unavoidable force that will prove beneficial to the world.”
Other than commercial inspection and monitoring, swarming will indeed be needed in many other situations like retail deliveries, rescue missions(especially with thermal imaging), city resource management and others. With Peter Diamandis and other members of the Singularity University faculty predict that by 2024 there will be 10,000,000 daily drone flights, we can envision that these drones need much communication among themselves, and humans won’t be part of it. “Here we are going from navigation level autonomy, to mission management autonomy” — as the founder of Accelerated dynamics puts it.
The company is pursuing a horizontal strategy that scales across markets and applications. UAVs is not the end play, swarming can be applied in the future to self-driving trucks, ground robots in factories and mines, and even autonomous ships. What will be most interesting is the interplay between different kinds of robotics in swarming (as the software is hardware agnostic) — for example when a retailing robot would deliver a package to a freight truck that takes it across the country and then maybe to a last mile delivery drone to combat city ingestion. Talk about enabling fully autonomous supply chains!
3) Sensat
There is no grander vision that digitizing the world to better understand it. This is exactly what Sensat are doing. In writing about “real world analytics” in the CV report, I wrote:
“Startups in the space can be doing just data supply and/or processing the data into insights that help governments, cities and businesses understand the factors affecting resources, risks and sales. Few investments were made in aerial imaging from satellites (ICEYE, Descartes Labs, Tellus Labs) and others in drone startups doing data capture/processing (3D Robotics, Precisionhawk, Slantrange, Identified Technologies) as well as those who combine it with hardware (Kespry). Visual data supply/analytics is a continuation of the much developed $130B big data market that is expected to grow beyond $200 Billion by 2020. The visual aspect could prove to become the most important part of it as experts predict 80% of all data available will be in image and video capture.”
Sensat is a competitor in the drone data capture and processing market, but takes things further with than 3DR ($53M in total invested equity) and Precisionhawk ($104M in total invested equity) with a proprietary 3D mapping software that giving anyone the ability to interact with the replicas of spaces like job sites and whole cities through a cloud based platform, thereby giving them access to massive amounts of real-time data.
The company is going after construction as a first vertical and providing a full-stack data solution, with the vision of combining IoT data with drone mapping — thereby enabling complete visibility on a project. The marginal value over traditional surveying means comes from:
- Automating the arduous data collection task
- Reducing job costs and time with the use of drones
- Much higher accuracy in data points collected
- Spotting changing site conditions in real-time and identifying problems
- Continuous capture to track resources and evolution of the project
Sensat is however already mapping whole cities and acquiring data in very efficient ways by having regulatory exemption from the UK government and through the pathfinder status. Data network effects ensure defensibility for the startups in this space, as they are monetized by spurring new insights that solve commercial problems and enable more informed decision-making. This is what VCs such as Greylock Partners are hinting to as the new moats and call them systems of intelligence, whereby the data creates a virtuous cycle of learning and makes the product better and more tailored to customers.
Jad El Jamous
