Airware Preps Launch Of Its Commercial Drone Operating System With $25M From Kleiner
Building a drone’s hardware and software from scratch is tough and expensive, but open source drone kits are inflexible. So to power businesses looking to customize drones for commercial uses from agriculture to industrial inspections, Airware has raised a $25 million Series B led by Kleiner Perkins. The money will fund the launch of Airware’s drone operating system later this year, including autopilot hardware, navigation, software, and cloud infrastructure for storing and analyzing data from a drone’s sensors.
Kleiner’s Mike Abbott will join the board, and previous investors Andreessen Horowitz andFirst Round Capital are also in on the raise that brings Airware to $40 million in funding. That gives it plenty of money to hire sales, marketing, support, and engineers in anticipation of Airware’s drone OS coming out of beta and into the market.
When I visited Airware’s office at laboratory this week, the company’s rapid ascent took me by surprise, until I realized founder Jonathan Downey‘s parents were both pilots.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/23/airware-drone-operating-system/
