Skydio

I’m excited to announce today that Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $3M financing of Skydio, a startup developing artificial intelligence systems for drones.

The Skydio team is awesomely qualified. They worked on drone vision systems at MIT and then co-founded a drone project at Google[x] called Project Wing. The company’s mission is to create smart drones. As cofounder Adam Bry says:

Drones are poised to have a transformative impact on how we see our world. They’ll enable us to film the best moments of our lives with professional quality cinematography and they’ll also change the way businesses think about monitoring their operations and infrastructure. This grand vision is starting to come into focus, but existing products are blind to the world around them. As a consequence, drones must fly high above the nearest structures or receive the constant attention of an expert operator. “Flyaways” and crashes abound. These problems must be solved for the industry to move forward.

Smart drone operators will simply give high-level instructions like “map these fields” or “film me while I’m skiing” and the drone will carry out the mission. Safety and privacy regulations will be baked into the operating system and will always be the top priority.

Here’s a fun video of an early Skydio prototype in action: