Skydio

“The new way is the drones live in these network connected charging base stations. We call them docks. And they're just available to fly 24 seven. So these things are flying themselves fully autonomously. There's no person in the loop.”

“So, on average now, in public safety, our customers are flying once every 30 seconds”

“So site security is our biggest, fastest growing application where they do a combination of responding to incidents.”

“This is a fully autonomous testing rig. So this is again just running unattended, 24 seven. So it's a bunch of drone propellers that generate 30, 35 miles an hour wind, and then we've got a dock sitting in front of it.”

“Designing these things is really akin to designing, like, a rocket ship or an aircraft, because there's just so much physical constraint, vibrations, thermals, aerodynamics, and because it's small, it's actually harder. Like, most of the ways that you solve pr…”

“If you have a barricaded suspect or something, you can land this perch for hours and establish two-way communication without ever putting a person in harm's way.”

“So this is called F-Ten. It's reusing a lot of the same core technology blocks from X-Ten and R-Ten, but it's in a fixed wing form factor that can fly a hundred miles an hour in a couple hours of flight time, and it is launched and caught by a robotic arm.”

“One of the most common requests we got from public safety was helping people in the water in trouble. There's a lot of coastline work here so this originally Came up with NYPD, the beaches around New York.”

“So we're in what I believe is the biggest drone factory in the US that's actually at scale production right now.”

“This was a hundred and ten million dollar fundraise, 4.4 billion dollar post-money valuation led by insider investors.”

“We're in the very rare and hard earned position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs.”

“We will be tripling production over the course of this year.”

“We're right around 4000 customers. These are enterprise government agencies that are using the products. So this is every branch of the Department of War, number of allies around the world, 1200 public safety agencies across the country, almost every State Dep…”

“It's already, you know, thousands of drones a month, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in, in revenue.”

“I think we're really the only surviving company that's building drone hardware from that era.”

“We find ourselves in a position of really being the only company in the world, certainly the only company outside of China that's capable of delivering these things reliably at scale.”

“Our biggest, fastest growing businesses are in the civilian sector. They're not in defense.”

“Skydio drones are in most major cities responding to nine one calls today at sort of small scale, like maybe part of the city, some fraction of the incidents that they're dealing with.”

“I think across our customer base, when people are sending drones, they're getting to the calls roughly like, 70, 80% of the time, they get there first”

“We did the math on this, I think, sixteen million Americans now live within two miles of one of our docking stations for first response, about five percent of the country”

“So, you know, the drone can fly to the location of a body camera, so an officer can just push a button on their body camera. If they're in trouble, they'll summon a drone to get there, and then after it lands, it'll upload the footage to Axon's evidence.com pr…”

“So now we're in a position to use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases, and that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of Dangerous work happens indoors. It's where the fixed wing drone that can cover much…”

“A year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government, and it was a pretty aggressive action. They announced the sanctions, and then they showed up at the suppliers that we still had in China, shut them down, stop them fro…”

“I think, actually, the East Bay, where we are near the Bay Area, has great potential for this. Like, there's some alternate universe Where this looks like what Shenzhen looks like, and I don't think there's anything fundamentally that should stop us from getti…”

“Tesla has generated some great alumni, and we have a lot of fantastic folks that have come from floors in the fire of production hell on Model Three”

“A lot of the engineering executives and leadership team that was in place there have become investors or advisors or mentors for us.”

“From a product perspective, I think the course that we're charting is towards Our drones being like flying agentic AI, just like you have an, you know, an agent that you interact with on your computer or in the cloud, this thing is an agent that can move and d…”

“I am not big on these, like, sort of, like, super granular cascading OKRs through the whole organization. I'm very big on coming up with, like, targets that we're aiming at. I sort of think of these things as, like, you know, We think that this product for thi…”

“We work with a company called Skydio, and they were sanctioned by China, and, ah, you know, we usually hear stories about how companies are, you know, sanctioned by the United States from doing business here, but it actually, if you're a company that's an impo…”

“Here comes this opportunity with Scotio, and the drones, and, ah, to, ah, be able to be an early investor.”

“So we've deployed prepared nine one, flock safety, Skydio drones and so basically, so, so the way to think about it is, if a gunshot goes off, or if an emergency call comes in or if you kind of show up on a, ah, flag safety camera, you know, and you've kidnapp…”

“A system that costs a few thousand dollars can take out a system that costs a few million dollars.”

“Candidly, like, our first round of drones in Ukraine basically failed.”

“Had built the system largely informed by the US Army's requirements for what they thought was important for a quadcopter in this space. And electronic warfare was just nowhere on that list.”

“We've had the same experience where, like, sometimes it's taken us two years to push new software into deployed systems.”

“Companies like Skydio and Andrill and others are really taking on that mantle and training a new generation of full-stack engineers that are really comfortable and fluent across hardware and software.”

“He actually called out Skydio, which is one of his portfolio companies who got their batteries embargoed by China, and now they're hunting around for new batteries.”

“China just you know, put a sanction on getting kind of supplies to Skydio, which is the leading U.S. Drone company.”

“The biggest US drone maker, Skydio, which supplies Ukraine, faces a supply crisis after China bans the company from selling batteries to the group.”

“So we've delivered thousands of systems to the Army, to the Marines to allies, and we have hundreds of systems now being used every day in Ukraine.”

“You can have one operator responsible for multiple drones. Five, 1000, and eventually maybe someday thousands. And I think that's a super, super powerful operating paradigm.”

“We did a lot of work with LiDAR, but the vehicles were super heavy, super expensive. So when we started Skydio, we made a big bet on vision because we felt like the progress that's happening in computer vision now especially with deep learning, but even in sor…”

“We have 13 cameras on the device, they see in every direction, and then at its core it has a super powerful computer. We're using the NVIDIA TX-one, which is basically like a deep learning supercomputer that uses the same GPU design, the same architecture that…”

“The path planning algorithm is actually predicting about four seconds into the future, so it's looking at what you're doing, it's looking at the environment around it. It's reasoning, and then it's using all of these sort of future possibilities to figure out …”