Drone ()
In the past few years, the drone market has grown from its infancy to one of the hottest industries in the world. So hot, in fact, that PricewaterhouseCoopers predicts the global drone market will be worth $127 billion by 2020.
But one of the biggest questions remains how established business will utilize drones. To solve that problem, Colin Guinn started Hangar, a software company focused on bridging the gap between drones and traditional businesses.
Guinn estimates there are around 20,000 individually owned drones in the US, and he wants to put those drones to work. Benzinga caught up with him to figure out how.
Benzinga: First, tell me about your involvement in the drone business?
Colin Guinn: I started with drones 9-10 years ago. I figured out there were these people building these big giant remote helicopters from Germany, and it sounded like a great excuse to buy a $25,000 toy helicopter.
Then I got into developing hardware 5 years ago. I founded DJI North America [ed. Note: the North American arm of DJI], and was a product developer for the Phantom. And I did sales and distribution for all those products. Then I worked for 3D Robotics as their Chief Revenue Officer.
Explain Hangar. What exactly is the company trying to do?
Picture the market as a whole. The drone side has had advancements in hardware and software. These are drones that are very advanced, with long range, stable cameras. Also, you have great software that solves niche problems, like stitching images together and looking for gas leaks with thermal cameras.
On the other side, you have all these people that are really passionate about going out and flying their drones around and would love to be able to use their drones to make money.
Essentially, what Hanger is doing is creating a platform that’s the plumbing that allows the enterprise demand to get to those different parties. We’re kind of stitching it all together to make it really easy for large enterprise customers to acquire drone data they’re looking for.
Is this hole in the market something you realized before?
This model we’re doing now is something we’ve been seeing the need for for last 4-5 years. It's been a matter of seeing the regulations that allow this model to exist.
Look at the demand side. It’s one thing for a small farmer to contact one guy. But if you look at a massive geographically disperse global firm, finding little local service providers is very disruptive to their workflow.
You essentially have all of these large enterprises that really value and are happy to pay for the type of insight they can get from drone data, but it’s very difficult for them to actually acquire it because of how broken the stack is.
There’s a ton of 2-5 person companies using their drones to make money. Real estate shooting. Monitoring construction sites. Agriculture. Whatever. These guys really want to get out there and use their drones for work. But they are a hard time getting into the market and sell themselves to enterprises.
How would the process work?
So take next hail season. What we envision is this platform exists where an insurance company in an affected hail area, they would have a notification [via an API] of those homes that would be affected, so they need to get a visual inspection of their roofs.
Then drones would get dispatched out from a network of pilots. We’re saying “Here’s a bunch of jobs available in your area. Let us control your drones, and then you get paid.”
Through deep integration with hardware companies we can create a very accurate inspection of the roof fully autonomously without the pilot having special training. They drop it off, we control the drone, we collect the data, bring it into our back end, and create reports.
For people unfamiliar with the drone space, how big of a market is there for this service?
Oh, the size of the addressable market is huge. Every wind turbine, cellphone tower. Commercial buildings for insurance. Natural disasters. Homes. We have 3-4 customers we’re working with in Austin that we’ve done 1,000 jobs for.
Will this entire process be automated?
We’re mainly reliant on automation and software. The only part that’s not is somebody physically delivering sensor to the job site. Everything else is based on automation and machine learning.
I was collecting drone data for big companies, but I had to do it very manually and it took a lot of skilled training [such as work on movie sets and oil rigs]. Hangar focuses on jobs that can be done fully autonomously. Eventually it’ll become a system people can integrate with, and they’ll have models to project how the data will look.
You recently announced a $6.5 million funding round to go along with early investments from firms like Lux Capital. How are you putting that to use?
The vast majority of resources is going into software development right now. We’re taking what has been a very mechanical process and turning into an autonomous process. We’re in the low 30’s [in terms of employees] but that number will grow by the end of the year.
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The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
