Skylark Drones Raises $3 Mn Funding Led By InfoEdge Ventures, IAN Fund

Drone platform company, Skylark Drones announced today that it has secured $3 Mn in a pre-series A funding round co-led by investors such as InfoEdge Ventures and IAN Fund with participation from AdvantEdge Founders, Fowler Westrup, Redstart Labs, IKP and Vimson group. This follows the company’s previous seed funding round, which took place in 2018.

The funding will be deployed to enhance the actionable insights from drone data that it provides, in order to aid and simplify superior business decisions and strategy for its clients. The investment will also be used to spur international product expansion and development of its drone data analytics products.

Founded in 2014 by Bangalore based engineers, Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy and Mrinal Pai, the company provides work-site intelligence to enable accurate business decision-making using drone data.Currently, it has offices in the U.S. and India, and claims to have over 100 enterprise clients, more than 1 Mn images processed and over 20,000 autonomous flights executed via its platform.

“Our vision is to unlock the economic potential of aerial intelligence,” said Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy, CEO and cofounder of Skylark Drones.

Speaking on the potential of the drones market, Rajnish Kapur, managing partner at IAN Fund said, “The global drone software market size is projected to reach $9.96 Bn by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 25.05% between 2020 and 2027. With the rising adoption of advanced technologies such as AI and ML, Skylark Drones’ solutions can unlock potential while increasing productivity and ensuring safety of work-sites. What impressed us most was a strong and unique business model – one that is easily scalable in India and beyond. We are delighted to make this contribution and hope the company marks its presence globally.”

“Drones are becoming the norm for remote worksite monitoring & inspections, and we have seen rapid adoption from marquee enterprises like Tata Steel, Ultratech Cement, Softbank Energy over the past few years. We look forward to serving more enterprises in the next leg of our growth story,” added Mrinal Pai, cofounder of Skylark Drones.

According to Inc42 Plus’s report titled Drone Technology India Opportunity report 2019, drone startups had only a 2.26% share among the deeptech investments between 2014 and 2018. However, as of 2019, drone startups raised a total funding of $16.55 Mn, which is a significant rise. The number of Indian drone startups too crossed 50 as the market was introduced to some key players such as Cron Technology, Detect Systems, Drones Tech Lab etc. India’s drone startups also played a major role in the Covid19 pandemic as they helped in medicine delivery, sanitisation etc.