Drone data company Skycatch receives 25M in funding

Drone data capture company Skycatch has announced it has received $25 million in funding in its latest funding round to develop its operations and product offerings further. The funding was on top of a $13.2 million funding round all the way back in 2014.

The funding round was led by ADB Ventures and Wavemaker. It was founded in 2013 to develop a solution that allows drones to capture centimeter-accurate image data to create 3D scans.

The company has already rolled out its Skycatch Vision Engine, Edge1, and Explore1 drone to locations worldwide, with over 10,000 sites making use of it. The countries the drone technology is currently active in include Chile, Colombia, Peru, Brazil, Australia, Canada, the US, Indonesia, China, the Philippines, Thailand, and Japan.

Skycatch founder and CEO Christian Sanz shared:

The process of generating high-precision, centimeter-accurate data is extremely difficult. It is typically owned by the laser scanning market. Drones, in general, out of the box are not able to achieve that. We saw the true value prop for Skycatch is operating in edge environments where there’s no connection to the internet. That’s where we saw the most demand initially. That is typically mining companies operating in all of these remote regions.

Skycatch focuses on two industries, for now, mining and construction. Its system can be configured with two drones, the DJI Phantom 4 RTK or the company’s own Skycatch Explore1, with a dual-camera system and RTK ability through a proprietary high-accuracy module.

Both drones work with the Skycatch Edge1 ground-station that is a GNSS receiver, and an edge compute module for the data captured by the drone. This allows datasets to be processed on-site without an internet connection and outputs readable data within 30 minutes.

All of this integrates with the Skycatch 3D Data Hub that allows users to create volume calculations, distance and grade measuring, height and slope maps, point labeling, measuring the surface area and change over time, and access to raw data manage users. The data can also be exported to support your workflow better.

ADB’s Daniel Hersson tol TechCrunch:

Asian Development Bank (ADB) aims to play a catalytic role to enable technology in infrastructure projects, which result in reduced carbon footprints and increased safety and operational efficiency. The enterprise-grade Skycatch technology for capturing, processing, and analyzing high-accuracy 3D drone data is a critical part of accomplishing that mission.

Photo: Skycatch

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