Skydio has become a leading U.S. drone manufacturer and a world leader in autonomous flight, and the recognition of its innovations is growing. In January, the company—which designs, assembles, and supports its products in the U.S. from its headquarters in Redwood City, CA—received the CES 2021 Best of Innovation Award for Drones and Unmanned Systems for its X2, the company’s new autonomous drone for enterprise and public sector customers.
“The X2 delivers groundbreaking intelligence and robustness that allows professional pilots to get the job done faster, more accurately, and with greater peace of mind,” said Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio. “Our goal is to make drones easier and safer to use than ever while opening up entirely new use cases based on autonomous flight.”
This week Skydio was also named to Fast Company’s annual list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2021. The list honors the businesses that have not only found a way to be resilient in the past year but also turned those challenges into impact-making processes. This year’s MIC list features 463 businesses from 29 countries.
“Our mission at Skydio is to make the world more productive, creative, and safe with autonomous flight,” said Bry. “We’re motivated by how much further we have to go to realize the full potential of autonomous flying machines.”
Skydio’s founders—CEO Bry, Abraham Bachrach, CTO, and Matt Donahoe—met in 2009 as grad students at MIT where they helped pioneer autonomous drone technology. After MIT, they helped start Google’s Project Wing. Skydio was founded in 2014 on the premise that the way to make drones more useful is to make them more intelligent. In 2018, it launched the R1, which was widely regarded as a breakthrough in autonomous drones for consumers and as a platform for commercial development.
The company’s leadership, which now also includes COO Mark Cranney and CMO Alberto Farronato, believes that autonomy is the key ingredient to unlock the full potential of drone technology. Its autonomous drones leverage advanced computer vision to understand the environment around them and artificial intelligence to make smart decisions while navigating without the need for a human pilot. Skydio is now made up of leading experts in AI, robotics, cameras, and electric vehicles from top companies, research labs, and universities from around the world.
It is backed by top investors and strategic partners, and earlier in March announced it had raised $170 million in Series D funding led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Growth Fund—bringing the total funding raised to over $340 million, with a current valuation of over $1 billion. Andreessen Horowitz, which also led the Series A, is joined in this round by existing investors Linse Capital, Next47, and IVP, along with new investor UP.Partners.
Skydio said it will use the additional capital to further accelerate product development and global sales expansion to support the rapidly growing demand for its autonomous drone solutions.
“The initial wave of hype around enterprise drones passed many years ago, but we’re now seeing these markets really mature,” said David Ulevitch, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Autonomy is the key for drones to reach scale, and Skydio has established themselves as the defining company in this category.”
Following the introduction in 2019 of the S2, which it says was the first autonomous drone for consumers, the company introduced several solutions for enterprise and public sector customers such as the X2, Skydio House Scan, and Skydio 3D Scan.
“From the moment we met the Skydio team and saw the S2 in action, we knew this was going to be a world-changing company,” added Bastiaan Janmaat, Partner at Linse Capital. “Think of all the dangerous jobs requiring ladders, harnesses, or helicopters to do work that can now, with Skydio, be done much more safely and efficiently. Autonomous drones will enable our aging infrastructure to be monitored much more effectively and our first responders will have greater situational awareness than ever before.
Over the last year, Skydio has made significant progress in its mission. Highlights include continued adoption of S2 by consumers, what is said to be the largest ever enterprise drone deal with EagleView for residential-roof inspection, and the down-selection for final integration as part of the U.S. Army Short Range Reconnaissance (SSR) Program. The company has been chosen for autonomous-drone deployments across construction companies, departments of transportation, energy utilities, and police departments for infrastructure inspection, search and rescue, situational awareness, and emergency response.
The X2 is the company’s new autonomous drone for enterprise and public sector customers. The drone pairs Skydio Autonomy, an AI-driven system that gives drones the skills of an expert pilot, with a foldable, highly portable airframe that leverages high-strength composites to withstand the most demanding environments. It mounts a dual 12-MP color optical plus 320 x 256 resolution FLIR thermal sensor and is equipped with GPS-based night flight and strobe lighting, making it ready for both day and night operations while providing up to 35-min flight times on a single battery. The solution provides an aerial data collection solution for situational awareness, asset inspection, and security patrol.
In February, Skydio announced that it was selected for final integration in the U.S. Army’s Short Range Reconnaissance Program, with the defense-focused X2D SRR system to complete remaining integration and documentation requirements within the Other Transaction Agreement Prototype Phase. The program aims to equip soldiers with a rapidly deployable small UAS (unmanned aircraft system) solution to conduct reconnaissance and surveillance activities.
“Access to accurate, timely information on the battlefield is a critical determining factor for mission success,” said Chuck McGraw, Skydio Director of Federal Sales. “Drones are powerful situational awareness tools for organic unit-level ISR, but legacy manual solutions are difficult to fly and easy to crash.
With its AI-powered autonomy, Skydio says its X2D represents the next step in the evolution of small unmanned aircraft systems for ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) to reduce cognitive overload by unlocking the simplest and most effective flight experience.
