Angel Investment Fuel’s Skydio’s UAV Software Launch

A new drone-navigation firm has three million reasons to be optimistic in 2015.

Skydio announced a successful corporate launch last week, fueled by fresh $3-million cash infusion from venture capitalists Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners.

Helmed by a trio of MIT grads, Skydio makes UAV software focused on enhancing safety and accuracy.

“While current technology relies on spotty GPS signals and constant attention from operators, Skydio’s software will help drones become acutely aware of their surroundings, easier to control and ultimately autonomous,” a company spokesperson said.

“The Skydio team is awesomely qualified, Chris Dixon, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in a blog post. “They worked on drone vision systems at MIT and then co-founded a drone project at Google[x] called Project Wing,” he added.

Skydio co-founder Adam Bry sees his company as an enabler of improved overall drone tech:

Drones are poised to have a transformative impact on how we see our world. They’ll enable us to film the best moments of our lives with professional quality cinematography and they’ll also change the way businesses think about monitoring their operations and infrastructure. This grand vision is starting to come into focus, but existing products are blind to the world around them. As a consequence, drones must fly high above the nearest structures or receive the constant attention of an expert operator. “Flyaways” and crashes abound. These problems must be solved for the industry to move forward.

Dixon is no stranger to drone investment, having already funded Airware.

“I see Airware and Skydio as complementary… I’d like to make more drone investments – at any stage including seed investments,” he said. He described the pairing as “the operating system (Airware) and Skydio as the most important app on top of the operating system.”

Skydio promises to help a UAV be more aware of its surroundings with an array of onboard video data. “The challenge is extracting that information and making it useful for the task at hand. That challenge, and the incredible capabilities that are unlocked, are our focus,” Bry said.

Bry met co-founder Abe Bachrach, Skydio’s CTO, at MIT and the duo was on the founding team of Project Wing at Google[x]. Matt Donahoe, Skydio’s CXO (X for eXperience), grew up making movies before turning to programming as another storytelling medium.