CEO Doersch on Kespry, NVIDIA, and the near future

Kespry is among a rash of start ups that are whipping up the winds of innovation driving the drone industry. And they are starting to take off. Piloting Kespry is Paul Doersch, founder and CEO. Doersch was successful in obtaining seed funding from Chmod Ventures and $10 million Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, a feat that earned him a spot on the Huffington Post’s Top 10 people to Know in Silicon Valley.

We spoke with Mr. Doersch recently about his company, its value proposition, its collaboration with NVIDIA, and his views on the future.

Kespry makes autonomous drones for the construction and mining industries. These are turnkey aerial devices that require no manual piloting and are designed to “satisfy exact needs with specific solutions,” according to Doersch. “Customers are not expected to know anything [about drones],” he said. Firms can be up and running within hours of opening the box.

The system, using aerial imagery coupled with cloud-based data analysis, allows for quick, efficient and accurate  measurement of stockpiles. A mining firm, for example, can employ a Kespry drone to fly a 40-acre site with between 30 and 50 large stockpiles in less than 20 minutes, automatically process photo and elevation data into interactive maps and models accessible from a web browser within 1-6 hours, and automatically display the perimeter, area, volume and cut and fill sizes for each identified stockpile.

“It is very difficult to make a drone this easy to use,” said Doersch. It involves a scientific team with expertise in a variety of areas, including computer science, mechanical engineering, aerospace, and electrical engineering with specialties in robotics, computer vision and data visualization.

What Doersch sees in the future is further advancement of and improvements to both drone technology and cloud computing. He believes it is “all about the data.” The drone will get smarter about its environment. For example it might have indoor inspection capabilities and include more sophisticated on board sensors.  Second, cloud computing will continue to advance and solve “big data problems” for other industries such as oil and gas. “There are tremendous amounts of efficiency to be gained” with the processing of aerial information. The task ahead is to clearly define use cases and follow through on implementation of the functionality to address them.

Looking to the future, Kespry recently announced development of a prototype drone that incorporates NVIDIA’s Jetson TX1 module. The prototype demonstrates enhanced drone-based information-gathering capabilities. This “new learning module,” as Doersch refers to it, will enable  companies to “specifically identify construction vehicles, building materials and other structures, so they’ll have even more relevant information to manage their job sites.” The information gathering of this type of data by the drone allows for improved asset tracking among other logistical benefits. (You can view a video of the prototype here.)

And then there is the name, Kespry. Doersch came up with the name. It is a hybrid of two birds of prey the kestral and the osprey. These birds are unique in that they can hover. You can view them here:

• Kestrel hovering
• Osprey hovering and fishing