Drones Take Off in Silicon Valley

May 15, 2013
American skies aren't supposed to open for another couple of years to drones flown by commercial operators, but they're already getting liftoff with Silicon Valley investors.

American skies aren't supposed to open for another couple of years to drones flown by commercial operators, but they're already getting liftoff with Silicon Valley investors.

On Wednesday, a drone start-up called Airware plans to announce that it has raised $10.7 million in a round of financing led by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures, the investment arm of the search giant, is also pitching in money.

Although the term drone conjures up images of unmanned military planes that can shoot missiles from the sky, Airware is developing technology for the budding array of commercial uses for unmanned aerial vehicles, as they are also known. The company, based in Newport Beach, Calif., and founded by former aerospace engineers from Boeing and other companies, has created a combination of hardware and software that can be added to drones made by other companies to make them more programmable, Jonathan Downey, the chief executive of Airware, said in an interview.

For example, Airware is integrating its technology into drones that will be used to prevent poaching of rhinos in Kenya. Mr. Downey said its technology will help the drones fly autonomously and locate rhinos by tracking radio frequency tags on them. The company is also working on drones for skier search-and-rescue operations, vaccine delivery in remote parts of Africa and Southeast Asia and inspections of open-air mining operations in France.

Mr. Downey said Airware usually works on drones that cost $20,000 to $50,000, not the dirt cheap drones in the consumer market that can sell for as little as $300.

Using the analogy of the personal computer industry, Chris Dixon, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said Airware is "sort of the Windows layer to drones," while actual drone makers are akin to Dell, Hewlett-Packard and others. Mr. Dixon envisions Airware's technology being used by other parties to develop applications - one for farmers, say, that helps inspect crops for more efficient use of water and fertilizer.

For-profit uses of drones in the United States isn't technically legal yet, but that will change soon. Last year, Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to figure out how to integrate drones into domestic airspace safely by 2015. The growing interest in the technology, especially from law enforcement agencies, which have already begun using drones in some cases, has prompted heated debates about the privacy implications of flying surveillance cameras.

Even without the ability to serve the United States market, Airware has had to turn away customers in recent months, Mr. Downey said. He said the company will use its new financing to hire more people.

"We don't have to have the U.S. market to be successful," he said. "We have a lot of customer interest globally."

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