2018 has already been a big year for DroneDeploy and our community of drone mappers around the world. Today it gets even more exciting. We’re happy to announce that we’ve raised $25 million to take our platform to the next level as we break into new industries.
With this new funding round, we have the opportunity to work with more customers who will bring our drone data platform to new industries, and transform workflows on every job site.
We started DroneDeploy to make drones accessible tools to everyone, and we’ve since become the world’s largest commercial drone software platform by providing drone software that’s both powerful and easy to use. Our growth is a testament to the growing community of commercial drone users and the value drone data delivers to companies of all sizes. Read on to learn how we plan to put this new funding to work.
Teaming Up with World-Class Investors
This funding round is led by the Invenergy Future Fund, a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage companies that make energy and industrial operations more affordable, reliable, and secure. The round is also backed by AirTree, one of the largest venture capital firms in Australia.
“Our investment process into this market was customer-led. The consistent theme we heard from customers was that DroneDeploy’s product and accompanying applications help achieve significant ROI and reduce risk on the job site. We are excited about the early and growing market leadership the company has established in power and energy industries.” — John Tough, Partner at the Invenergy Future Fund
Invenergy and AirTree join our existing investors, Scale Venture Partners, Uncork Capital, Emergence Capital, and AngelPad.
Maintaining Our Momentum
We’ve seen unparalleled growth in 2018 as we hit a significant milestone: 30 Million acres mapped by DroneDeploy customers. We also released new features and developed strategic partnerships with SoftBank, Accenture, and The Climate Corporation. Most recently, we launched the industry’s only real-time mapping solution — Live Map — to provide instant insights on the job site. And our newly released enterprise cloud capabilities offer the management and security tools necessary to scale drone operations across large organizations.
Read more about our growth in our 2018 Commercial Drone Industry Trends Report.
We plan to use our latest round of funding to maintain this momentum. The funding will help us deliver additional value to customers as we expand our ecosystem of 80+ apps and integrations, develop new features, and accelerate a series of industry-focused solutions.
Building Artificial Intelligence Solutions for Industry
Over the last four years, we’ve built the largest drone dataset in the world — consisting of more than 100 million aerial images collected in 180 countries across 400,000 job sites.
Now we’re putting that data to work as we build industry-leading machine learning solutions to solve the real-world challenges companies face everyday. These solutions will help companies automate workflows and manage the influx of data generated by millions of drones. In the coming months, we’ll release entirely autonomous workflows for measuring buildings and stockpiles, detecting objects and structures, and improving flight planning to collect high-quality data with the push of a button.
Learn more about the future of the DroneDeploy platform in our recent webinar.
Driving Drone Data Adoption in New Industries and New Markets
While we’re seeing incredible adoption in some of today’s largest industries, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more to come as key sectors deploy drones to gather site intelligence. We’ll be using this funding to drive adoption in the energy sector as we expand our solutions to help solar and oil & gas companies generate aerial insights.
“DroneDeploy’s horizontal model means it is able to leverage best practice R&D from a range of industry verticals. We are excited to join this round, and we look forward to diving in and supporting the team with their Australian expansion plans” — Craig Blair, Managing Partner and co-founder of AirTree Ventures
To date, we’ve mostly focused our efforts on the US, but this funding will allow us to target new global markets, like Australia where we’ve seen significant growth in customers and revenue over the last year. We plan to continue this momentum by working with our partners at AirTree to digitize Australia’s largest industries. AirTree’s experience in partnering with global platforms to expand in Australia made them a natural choice as investors.
Looking Ahead
It’s been an incredible journey so far, and we couldn’t be more excited for what’s to come. We look forward to the challenges ahead as we work closely with customers around the globe to bring drones to every job site.
Where to Learn More
- Learn more about the industries leading drone adoption in our 2018 Commercial Drone Industry Trends Report.
- Curious what we think is in store for the commercial drone industry this year? Read our top 8 predictions for 2018.
- What types of results can drones deliver? Get a look at the numbers behind the drone data in this post.