NTT Docomo Ventures
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Autonomous drone startup Skydio raises $100 million and launches the X2 commercial drone
Skydio has raised a $100 million Series C funding round, which was led by Next47 and includes participation from other new investors Levitate Capital and NTT DOCOMO Ventures, as well as existing investors a16z, IVP and Playground. This new funding will help the drone maker move faster on its product development efforts, and expand its go-to-market strategy to cover not only consumer applications, but also enterprise and public sector drone technology, the company says. To serve the market, Skydio also launched the X2 family of drone hardware today, which is designed for commercial use.
Founded in 2014, Skydio has raised $170 million total and launched two consumer-focused drones to date, both of which employ artificial intelligence technology to give them autonomous navigation capabilities. This means their drones can actively track objects and people, while simultaneously avoiding potential collisions with objects, including trees, power lines and other obstacles. The end result is video that looks like it was recorded by a professional film crew in a helicopter, but available to the general consumer market in a sub-$1,000 price point.
The first Skydio drone, the R1, was launched in 2018, and retailed for $2,499. Its intelligence and tracking capabilities were impressive, and were later improved via software updates and the second-generation hardware, which launched last year and is currently available for order.
Skydio’s new X2 drone platform is designed for enterprise use, and will ship in Q4 of this year, according to the company. It includes an onboard 360-degree superzoom camera, a FLIR 320×256 resolution thermal imaging camera, a battery life of 35 minutes of flying time and a maximum range of 6.2 miles. There’s also a Skydio Enterprise Controller for the drone, which has a touchscreen, hardware controls and a protective hood to block glare.
The move from consumer to enterprise makes a lot of sense for Skydio; the same collision avoidance features and easy piloting for which the company has received praise in the consumer world are very applicable in enterprise use. The company says that its close-proximity avoidance tech, which allows for very tight tolerances in flight, make it a great candidate for doing things like remote infrastructure and equipment inspection, where having a person do those would be dangerous or impossible.
X2 can also capture 180-degree images directly above itself, which makes it uniquely capable of inspecting bridge spans and other overhead construction from a different perspective than is offered by many rotor-drones like this one. And the infrared coverage means it can operate day and night, and provide heat-maps of targets.
Skydio will still serve the consumer market as well, but this progression throughout its brief history is likely a very attractive one for investors: The company went from an expensive, but highly capable, consumer product accessible only to a few individuals, to a much more accessibly priced but still high-tech offering, and now appears to be turning the economies it has realized in its tech to the potentially much more lucrative enterprise hardware and software arena.
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Storage provider Cloudian raises $94M
Cloudian, a company that specializes in helping businesses store petabytes of data, today announced that it has raised a $94 million Series E funding round. Investors in this round, which is one of the largest we have seen for a storage vendor, include Digital Alpha, Fidelity Eight Roads, Goldman Sachs, INCJ, JPIC (Japan Post Investment Corporation), NTT DOCOMO Ventures and WS Investments. This round includes a $25 million investment from Digital Alpha, which was first announced earlier this year.
With this, the seven-year-old company has now raised a total of $174 million.
As the company told me, it now has about 160 employees and 240 enterprise customers. Cloudian has found its sweet spot in managing the large video archives of entertainment companies, but its customers also include healthcare companies, automobile manufacturers and Formula One teams.
What’s important to stress here is that Cloudian’s focus is on on-premise storage, not cloud storage, though it does offer support for multi-cloud data management, as well. “Data tends to be most effectively used close to where it is created and close to where it’s being used,” Cloudian VP of worldwide sales Jon Ash told me. “That’s because of latency, because of network traffic. You can almost always get better performance, better control over your data if it is being stored close to where it’s being used.” He also noted that it’s often costly and complex to move that data elsewhere, especially when you’re talking about the large amounts of information that Cloudian’s customers need to manage.
Unsurprisingly, companies that have this much data now want to use it for machine learning, too, so Cloudian is starting to get into this space, as well. As Cloudian CEO and co-founder Michael Tso also told me, companies are now aware that the data they pull in, whether from IoT sensors, cameras or medical imaging devices, will only become more valuable over time as they try to train their models. If they decide to throw the data away, they run the risk of having nothing with which to train their models.
Cloudian plans to use the new funding to expand its global sales and marketing efforts and increase its engineering team. “We have to invest in engineering and our core technology, as well,” Tso noted. “We have to innovate in new areas like AI.”
As Ash also stressed, Cloudian’s business is really data management — not just storage. “Data is coming from everywhere and it’s going everywhere,” he said. “The old-school storage platforms that were siloed just don’t work anywhere.”
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Kaizen, a Tokyo- and San Francisco-based user interface marketplace and testing platform, plans to increase its presence in the United States after raising an $8 million Series B.