Berkeley-based drone producer 3DR could also be again in the recreation: the firm introduced $53 million in Series D funding on Thursday. This announcement comes lower than a yr from 3DR’s final inflow of $26.7 million final June.
The new spherical included each new fairness and conversion of debt fairness: how a lot of every has not but been disclosed. But clearly, buyers are nonetheless keen to guess on 3DR’s capacity to show themselves right into a industrial drone platform.
3DR’s shopper drone, the Solo, remains to be utilized by many industrial drone operators. But 3DR’s manufacturing challenges led the firm to cease making Solos in 2015, shifting to a industrial platform play. 3DR’s co-founder Chris Anderson mentioned that the firm was unable to compete with manufacturing large DJI, even after shifting its personal manufacturing facility abroad. An overestimate of demand had left the firm with warehouses filled with Solos as DJI launched newer variations of its widespread Phantom traces.
After shedding a portion of its workforce and restructuring its govt crew, the firm introduced a “change in direction” from the shopper to the industrial drone market. 3DR’s new signature product, Site Scan, is a SaaS providing that gives flight management and cloud-based information processing. The product integrates with Autodesk (an investor and channel associate for 3DR.) The integration overlays drone information output with site-plan info from Autodesk, giving a building crew further info.
Autodesk was a number one investor in this most up-to-date spherical additionally. “The strategic investment from the Autodesk Forge Fund — which follows an initial investment made in early 2016 — demonstrates Autodesk’s commitment to 3DR and reality capture software,” says 3DR. “We have already harnessed the power of the Forge platform to build key features for Site Scan, and will continue to utilize Forge to accelerate product development and deepen workflow integrations with Autodesk products.”
3DR says that it’s going to use the new funding to proceed to construct out Site Scan.