Flyability secures CHF 15 million to develop new drone sensing and autonomy technologies

Flyability, the Vaud-based leading indoor inspection drone company, has raised CHF 15 million in a Series C financing round.

With its technology, Flyability enables the indoor exploration and inspection of inaccessible and confined spaces. As a result, safety risks for energy workers can be significantly reduced, as well as labor costs incurred from complex manual inspections. In addition, environmental risks associated with the inspection of critical infrastructures can also be identified and prevented.

The Series C funding comes just a few months after Flyability launched Elios 3, the world’s first collision-tolerant drone equipped with a LiDAR sensor for indoor 3D mapping. Elios 3 allows inspectors to visualize their assets in 3D models created in real time as the drone flies. Inspectors can create survey-grade 3D models after flights using software from Flyability and its growing list of software partners.

The Series C investment will help Flyability further strengthen its position as the market leader. It will also help develop new sensing and autonomy capabilities for the Elios 3, which was designed to be highly adaptable so that it could serve the specific needs of each industry that uses it.

The round was led by Japan-based SBI Investment with additional new investor participation from Cargill and Verve Ventures. Existing investors also participated, including Dow, ETF Partners, Swisscom, and Future Industry Ventures. 

Before investing in Flyability, both Cargill and Dow have been key customers and have used Flyability’s inspection technology to keep their workers out of potentially dangerous spaces during inspections. The implementation of such technology not only helps to improve worker safety, but also to advance industry 4.0 practices to digitize asset inspection processes.

A success story from Western Switzerland’s Drone Valley

Since its foundation in 2014, Flyability has grown to become the leading indoor inspection drone company with over 500 customers, 100 employees and a network of over 50 resellers worldwide.

Located at the heart of the Drone Valley, the company has benefited from the region’s drone ecosystem, which offers close cooperation between technical universities, industry and authorities, and which has brought Western Switzerland at the forefront of flying robotics and unmanned systems.

The Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, the EPFL, of which Flyability is a spin-off, is among the best robotics schools in the world. In recent years, over 80 drone companies have sprung up across Switzerland, generating 2,500 jobs.