We've only just scratched the surface of what drones can do and how they'll become popular. This also applies to industry, with the potential to replace human labor in dangerous tasks such as inspections at height.
Swiss startup Voliro is working in this space with flying robots that can inspect wind turbines, floating structures, and other infrastructure that is dangerous to human access due to factors such as height and weather conditions.
This goes beyond just visually inspecting for obvious problems like corrosion. Voliro's drones are equipped with sensors that can perform tasks such as dry film thickness, often without the need for a person on the rope. But don't expect CEO Florian Gutzwiller to tell you how many workplace accidents the company's drones are preventing. “I'm Swiss. If I were an American CEO, I'd say we save lives every day, but I think that's too aggressive,” he told TechCrunch.
Cultural differences aside, there is another reason Gutzwiller emphasizes aspects other than accident prevention, such as productivity. Even when everything is going well (which, fortunately, most of the time it is), industrial inspections cause downtime. Avoiding this downtime can result in significant cost savings for Voliro's clients, such as Chevron and Holcim, as well as inspection and maintenance service providers.
“One of my favorite examples is the flare stack,” Gutzwiller says. “The flare stack is hot and needs to be turned off. It needs to cool down. We need to build the scaffolding. Then we inspect it. After inspection, we remove the scaffolding and put the scaffolding up again. This can take days or weeks, but we can do it in 20 minutes.”
Voliro's competitors include Avestec, Flyability, and Skygauge, but Gutzwiller believes the versatile hardware gives his company an edge. We have a sensor that can handle heat, combined with the innovative core technology it is based on. It is a tiltable rotor that gives the robot 360 degrees of free movement. This means the robot can work on the ceiling and apply pressure without losing stability.
This advanced rotor was developed by part of the Voliro team within the Institute for Autonomous Systems at ETH Zurich before Voliro became one of a number of spin-off companies in 2019. Three years later, the drone was commercially available, but that's not the company's only selling point. The business model is B2B subscription.
Gutzwiller said this model has many advantages. For customers, this means not only receiving support, but also having access to hardware and software upgrades as they are developed. For the company, that means recurring revenue that can fund research and development, and it means showing the kind of cash flow that investors want.
This may explain why the company was recently able to raise $12 million despite a tough funding environment for startups and robotics. The company said the new capital injection, which brings its total funding to date to $22 million, was led by Cherry Ventures, with additional funding from existing business angels, family offices, and traditional debt facilities as a minority portion of the round. The investment has been made.
Commercial traction helped VCs and bankers, but there was still an element of luck and chance. As is commonplace these days, Bolillo pitched to a number of VC firms, but he never pitched to Cherry Ventures until Gutzwiller, a Mexican entrepreneur he happened to meet at a bus stop in the mountains, recommended him to him. Ta. Fast forward a few months and Cherry led Bolillo's Series A round.
Gutzwiller and Volillo's journey was also coincidental. After selling his company Open Systems to private equity in 2017, Gutzwiller became an angel investor, but not just in investing in the ETH spinoff. He became the company's resident entrepreneur and served as executive chairman until he was replaced by his predecessor. November 2022, CEO Mina Kamel.
Gutzwiller is currently spearheading Voliro's growth and is bullish about its approach to the platform. For example, third-party sensors that can detect corrosion under insulation will soon be supported. In the long term, further progress could be made toward repairs, such as having robots remove rust or add coatings themselves. But the company will first work to expand its customer base across oil and gas, energy and other industries that could benefit from reducing human work at height.