GE Ventures is collaborating with San Francisco-based startup Airware, which is building hardware, software and services for commercial drones, and has invested an undisclosed amount of funding in the company.
GE views drones as “flying sensors,” said GE Ventures Managing Director Alex Tepper, and is looking at roles for drones in its various field services businesses. These include oil and gas, transportation, power and wind.
For instance, drones could inspect wind turbines whose blades have stopped turning, a job that now falls to a person who is hoisted into the air. Drones could also fly through miles of oil pipelines, which are now inspected by people in trucks.
“For us, [drones] means situations where work is dull, dirty, dangerous or distant,” Mr. Tepper said.
Airware, which is incorporated as Unmanned Innovation Inc., was founded in 2011 by Jonathan Downey, a commercial pilot who graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and worked previously at Boeing Co. on the A160T Hummingbird, an unmanned helicopter.
Mr. Downey aims to make Airware a standard for commercial drones by enabling customers to select vehicles and then mix and match hardware and software components to create drones for different jobs.
Inspecting a wind turbine, for instance, would require a helicopter-like drone, while a pipeline-inspecting drone would need fixed wings. The software on those drones would be looking for different things as well.
Lately, Airware has placed more emphasis on managing, analyzing and disseminating the data collected from drones because that is what customers like GE want, Mr. Downey said.
Still, the market for commercial drones is nascent, fragmented and rapidly evolving, according to Mr. Tepper, and the investment gives GE a window into it. “This is a great investment for us,” he said.
Drone regulations are also in flux, particularly in the U.S. where most drone usage is still illegal, and Airware has been working with regulators to help develop regulations in both the U.S. and Europe, Mr. Downey said. It has also joined a group of drone manufacturers that includes Amazon.com Inc. and Google Inc. to lobby U.S. regulators.
The new money from GE Ventures is an extension of Airware’s $25 million Series B round that it raised in July from investors including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Andreessen Horowitz and First Round Capital. That round remains open, Mr. Downey said, although he declined to discuss other potential new investors or how much money Airware plans to raise.
Venture capitalists have also bet on several other drone startups, including Drone Deploy Inc., Kespry Inc. and PrecisionHawk USA Inc., which is backed by Intel Capital.
Airware’s first product is now due early next year.
Source: Wall Street Journal