DroneBase and Hangar to Combine On-Demand Pilot Network with 4D Insights

Drone pilot network DroneBase has partnered with data insight platform Hangar. The move will allow Hangar to scale its 4D Visual Insights solution nationwide and provide customers with an alternative to having an in-house drone data team.

The partnership will leverage DroneBase’s global API and network of pilots. In practice, this will mean that all Hangar customers have to do is request a location to monitor and select the desired insight types and capture frequency. Hangar and DroneBase will capture the data, convert the imagery to the requested specs, and deliver the insights in as little as 48 hours.

The partnership comes at an interesting time in the drone industry. The much-hyped (and substantially backed) Airware has just closed down after burning through more than $100m in funding. And the pressure is likely to be on other venture-backed drone data companies who are finding that their customers are increasingly able to take operations in-house.

What’s needed then is a more compelling proposition. DroneBase’s network of pilots and Hangar’s 4D Insights solution – which puts an emphasis on the dimension of ‘time’ to capture and analyze data over a series of flights – would appear to provide that.

“Drones provide enterprises across industries with integral data to make real-time decisions about their most critical assets,” said Dan Burton, CEO and Founder of DroneBase.

“With Hangar’s structured data, drone imagery becomes more than just photography. Combined with the speed and scale of DroneBase’s pilot network and API, this technology has the power to scale drone insights quickly and reliably.”

DroneBase and Hangar provide an end-to-end drone data package

Part of the reason companies such as Airware have struggled to fulfill their early promise is the fact that DJI has developed such a stranglehold on the hardware market, while also starting to push out commercial software. The proliferation of easy to fly drones has effectively made gathering data from above something anyone can do.

Instead of directly competing with DJI’s dominance, the move from DroneBase and Hangar seeks to embrace and augment it. DroneBase’s extensive pilot network is predominantly made up of DJI pilots and the company is itself backed by DJI.

Hangar’s 4D InSight tools offer clients in the construction, infrastructure, telecom, and energy industries a more intuitive way of gleaning insights from aerial data.

The two are hoping the combination will be compelling enough to lure organizations that would otherwise keep drone operations in-house.

“We enable companies to capture drone insights without investing in the drone, pilot, training or hassle. We make it simple,” said Chris Haines, Director of Operations at Hangar.

“Our platform automates the end-to-end process, from request to insights. With the scale and reliability of DroneBase’s global pilot network, we’re able to bring the technology almost anywhere, at the click of a button.”

The partnership between Hangar and DroneBase is available to enterprises today through the Hangar website.