附近上门

Drone startup , quite literally, flies under the radar.

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The company, which , sends fully autonomous drones to hard to reach areas, like mining facilities or defense areas, claiming to unlock data that will help with mapping.

It targets 鈥渄ata sets that are challenging to acquire because they are inaccessible, disconnected, dark or dangerous making it expensive, infrequent and inaccurate,鈥� , the CEO of Exyn, told 附近上门 News.

The most recent funding round was led by , with , , , and . Previous investor , Inc. also invested. Its total funding to date is over $20 million, the company says. The new funding will be used to help expand that technology, and also move its autonomy intelligence to ground-based robots, the company claims.

Elms says that 鈥渨hile big data is big鈥� these days, tools in place don鈥檛 favor a whole stream of industries, like construction, mining, and defense.

鈥淔or them, the analytical tool is not the problem, actually getting the data is,鈥� he says.

One of their customers, for example, wants to map the cavities created by drilling and blasting in underground mines.

The area that has the best data points around safety, however, 鈥渁lso happens to be [the location] where mining companies have the least information/data because of the inherent dangers of the environment.鈥�

Enter Exyn鈥檚 drone, which is a robot programmed to fly into environments to map obstacles, terrain, gas readings, and more. The robot鈥檚 entire mission takes 3 minutes, and the operations are fully pilotless, he says.

Elm says one of the biggest challenges ahead is being looped in as just another drone company.聽 The technology is fairly commoditized, he says, and its hype, in some ways has quieted. It鈥檚 true; it鈥檚 been a while since a drone startup has popped up on our radar, since an initial boost.

For example, last February, we listed 21 drone startups to watch out for. The industry, facing a spur of tech advances, was raking in billions in venture capital dollars, with the majority going to seed and early-stage companies. Other startups, like Skysafe and Airmap, were founded to help with regulation amid all this innovation.

Exyn鈥檚 Elm says it is because the domain has gone through its boom and now been commoditized.

Paola Santana, the co-founder of Matternet, a drone delivery startup, agrees with Elm and says it’s becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate yourself within the market.

Her advice for new drone startups is aim for the micro, instead of the macro. She recommends making a complete solution involving hardware and software, not just creating a drone that can see and sense.

“If there鈥檚 not a solid need for a drone to be used, it will just be a 鈥済ood to have鈥� tool that gets dismissed after the hype,” she told 附近上门 News. “The problem with that, specially for startups, is that you need complete alignment on what the team is going after, and wasting a couple of 聽months into something that is not a burning problem for a customer can (and ultimately will) kill the startup. ”

Elm says that his team looks “at the drone as purely the vehicle on which we integrate our autonomy capabilities, much like Waymo has integrated their autonomy capabilities onto a commodity car.”

A few months prior to the funding round, Exyn announced a commercial relationship with a Dundee Precious Metals. Soon after, its robots were deployed in the gold mines in Bulgaria. Elm says interest from other government contractors, including the U.S government, is on the way.

In a post-boom world for drones, any momentum feels noteworthy. With new cash and partnerships on the way, we鈥檒l see if Exyn鈥檚 bet on a quieter approach to drones will help it fly, or let it die.

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