Started in 2013 at IIT Kanpur, Aereo aims to penetrate the industrial drone applications market. The Bengaluru-based startup has already grown significantly covering mining, mapping, construction and infrastructure development. “When we started we noticed that drones were either applied in defence or used as a recreational tool. We wanted to cover the applications in between these two extremes. We like solving very grassroot problem using drones,” says Vipul Singh, co-founder and CEO, Aereo.
Aereo serves industries like mining, metal, power, large scale infra and then urban and rural development sectors. “Our largest segment is urban and rural development. We have about more than 60% share of the market right now. We work on some of the largest programmes which exist in India and our operations are right now limited to Indian boundaries,” says Singh.
According to him, Aereo is the largest contributor to one of the largest drone implementation programmes in the world called ‘SVAMITVA’ Scheme, which envisages to map about 660,000 villages. “The scope of this programme is to map all the villages in the country to create property ownership records for the residential plots, which was never done in the last 70 years of existence of this country as an independent nation,” says Singh.
For instance, the startup boasts of mapping 42,000 villages in the last 18 months in the country, highest by any drone company. Aereo has also mapped the entire state of Haryana, 28,000 square kilometers in about 14 months time. For these industrial applications, the startup makes its own drone design and hardware that includes the autonomous systems inside the overall structure of the drone and the propulsion system. The manufacturing of parts and components are outsourced to very specific vendors. “Around 30% to 40% of our parts come from outside, which primarily includes lithium ion cells, which goes into making our battery packs and they are not manufactured in India even today at any scale,” says Singh.
To process the rich data collected, Aereo utilises software built completely in house, processing over 1,00,000 images every month in the cloud. The company has built very vertical specific analytics engines. “We use these data to train our models in a way where they extract very specific details in the form of features and variations which are happening in the data sets,” says Singh.
“For instance, for the mining industry the engine will assess that with respect to the previous data set, how much volume of earthwork has been done,” he adds. The startup has been profitable since the last three years with over 450 employees and is in the process of raising Series B venture capital funds for capacity expansion and R&D. “The investments are in the sub Rs 50 crore range but whatever money we have raised in total, we have generated twice the revenue with profitability as well,” says Singh.