In robotics, the underlying technology isn’t the hardest part. The hard part is assembly, taking something that works in a demo and making it work on a job site, day after day, for a customer who's betting real money on it.
Today, Procore announced it is acquiring DroneDeploy for $845 million. That milestone is the payoff for over a decade of DroneDeploy doing world-class assembly work in drones and robotics.
I've had a front-row seat on this journey. Eighteen months before Emergence led DroneDeploy's Series A in 2015, I built a drone with my kids, mostly out of curiosity about what these things could actually do. It didn't take long to see that these machines weren't going to remain hobbyist toys. Any business that maps or monitors physical space has an obvious need for accurate, timely, and inexpensive aerial data. That conviction led me to DroneDeploy’s founders: Jono Millin, Mike Winn, and Nick Pilkington. We led their Series A when the company was pre-revenue. I took a board seat, my partner Jake Saper came on as an active observer, and the two of us have stayed close to this company ever since.
Software First
When DroneDeploy got started, many commercial drone companies had decided to build a full-stack solution that included software and their own hardware. DroneDeploy had a different approach. It built software that any drone maker could plug into. In doing so, it rode the industry's falling hardware costs instead of competing against large hardware makers, and put its energy into software.
At the same time, DroneDeploy did the hard work of educating the market. They helped businesses understand the value of drones and worked closely with their customers as they built out programs to take advantage of this new technology. Drones became the first robots deployed at scale across many industries.
By 2017, roughly two years after our initial investment, DroneDeploy began to close its first six-figure deals with enterprise customers. Today, many of the largest companies in construction, agriculture, energy, and a growing number of other verticals regularly use DroneDeploy for mission-critical operations.
AI added a new layer to DroneDeploy’s capabilities. The company had spent years accumulating a massive dataset of job-site images and video, captured first by drones and eventually by ground-based robots, too. DroneDeploy used this data to train models that could do real work, calculating what percentage of a construction project had been completed or where a safety hazard had appeared in a facility. A process that used to take a superintendent hours of manual walkthroughs now takes minutes, and the platform got dramatically more valuable almost overnight.
Learnings From DroneDeploy’s Journey
DroneDeploy was founded over a decade ago, well before the current AI-powered era of robotics. However, there are a number of things that newer companies in robotics can learn from DroneDeploy’s success. A few that are particularly worth mentioning:
First, be an assembler. DroneDeploy didn't win by building a better drone. It won by spending years in the field with construction foremen and energy engineers who had never used one, showing them what a single flight could tell them about a job they already knew how to run. That unglamorous, customer-by-customer education is what turned an interesting piece of technology into something an ENR 400 contractor would actually put on a purchase order.
Second, get to scaled deployment early. DroneDeploy spent nearly a decade capturing job-site imagery before any model could read it automatically. When vision models finally got good enough, that archive was already sitting there, which is the only reason DroneDeploy could ship progress-tracking and safety-flagging products almost overnight instead of starting from zero. Nobody builds a dataset like that after the model shows up. You build it because you believed, years earlier, that it would eventually matter.
Third, treat robotics as an ecosystem play by default. There are hardware makers to partner with, a growing set of foundation robot models to build on, and customer systems any solution has to integrate with. Fluency with ecosystem partners has been central to DroneDeploy's success. Procore itself was a partner to DroneDeploy long before it was an acquirer.
Congratulations to the DroneDeploy Team!
DroneDeploy was founded well before the current robotics wave, but the playbook holds. Congratulations to Jono, Mike, Nick, and the whole team. This milestone is a testament to a founding vision that was right about where drones and robots were headed, and about what it actually takes to get there. It’s been an honor to work with you all.
