Washington DC-based start-up Measure has raised a Series B round of $15 million led by US IT company Cognizant and Hudson Bay Capital. It intends to offer drones as service to companies looking to gather data and capture videos on ongoing processes and state of operations they handle on a continuous basis. It had raised $5 million in September 2015.
The company plans to use the freshly injected funds to expand the scope of operations into various markets, and deploy the latest in field of drones and sensors to satisfy industrial purposes. Measure CEO and co-founder Brandon Torres Declet said,
This is a tremendous moment for Measure and for the drone industry, and we believe 2017 is when everyone pivots toward services. Not only will this investment make it possible to expand to new customers, but the addition of Cognizant can help us offer new, innovative services around data analysis not currently available in the market.
Measure will also work with investor Cognizant and integrate traditional IT with new-age drone tech.
The company owns a significant number of drones and employs 20 pilots, along with data engineering and drone engineering specialists. It’s drones use a combination of both fixed-wing and multi-rotor models made by Aerialtronics, Aibotix, DJI and Sensefly. On the software front, it leverages Skyward and DroneDeploy for flight management and data processing.
Speaking about the niche his company operates in, Declet said,
Over the past 2 years there has been something like $750 million invested into this space. The vast majority went to hardware and software. But flying a drone isn’t intuitive. And getting quality data is difficult. So we focus on giving you ROI, not just selling you hardware or a software license.
Till now, Measure has extensively worked on projects like inspecting the cell towers of Verizon, accumulating aerial footage post disasters besides other practical purposes in the oil and energy sectors.
Meanwhile, the field has seen a massive surge of interest of late. In December last year, amazon Prime started conducting it’s Prime air drone delivery service in England. YC startup Apptonomy is also building drones that will be able to serve as flying security guards.
Drones are witnessing massive strides in both development and adoption, but alas the Indian government is still awaiting the home ministry’s policy inputs for using drones. Meanwhile, development within the country is progressing at research institutions. IIT Kharagpur students have gone on to develop indigenous drones, and the much acclaimed DRDO has also carried out the maiden flight of indigenous unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) Rustom-II.
