Skydio Lands $3M to Make Drones That Won't Crash

Several former Googlers have landed $3 million to move forward with their plans for "crash-proof" drones.
Skydio today announced a $3 million seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Accel Partners. Ultimately, the company wants to make drones "available, safe, and intuitive for a much broader audience and a much broader set of applications," CEO Adam Bry wrote in a blog announcement.
Drones are neat little gadgets, but with the wrong pilot, things can easily go awry.
"As a consequence, drones must fly high above the nearest structures or receive the constant attention of an expert operator," Bry wrote. "'Flyaways' and crashes abound. These problems must be solved for the industry to move forward."
That's where Skydio comes in. "A drone that's aware of its surroundings is far easier to control, safer to operate, and more capable," Bry wrote. "Almost all the information a drone needs to be good at its job can be found in onboard video data; the challenge is extracting that information and making it useful for the task at hand. That challenge, and the incredible capabilities that are unlocked, are our focus."

Bry and co-founder Abe Bachrach got their start in the Robust Robotic Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They were also part of the founding team for Google X's Project Wing, which constructed a self-flying drone that successfully delivered a parcel to Australia.
At Skydio, there are joined by Matt Donahoe, who now serves as the company's CXO (X for eXperience).
"Drones are poised to have a transformative impact on how we see our world," Bry wrote. "This grand vision is starting to come into focus, but existing products are blind to the world around them."
As The Verge noted, most drones require a global positioning system, and become useless if that signal is lost. The next generation of drones, however, are testing a sense-and-avoid function, which allows the device to correct for poor piloting.
The Verge recently got a demo of Skydio's prototype quadcopter, which has two small cameras streaming video to an Intel media center. Despite the lack of GPS, it managed to hover in place "100 percent based on the visual it has of us standing here," Donohoe said.
Details of Skydio's early models remains sparse, but Bry promised "autonomous vehicles with capabilities beyond those of the best human pilots."
"Many centuries of knowledge in mathematics and computer science is poised to create the first meaningfully autonomous systems for everyday use," the CEO said. "At Skydio we believe this will be the most rewarding engineering challenge of our generation."
For more, check out Skydio's drones in action in the video below.

Remote-controlled flyers, meanwhile, were a mainstay at this month's CES in Las Vegas, where drones ranged in size from a business card to a massive model being targeted for military use.