January 24, 2018

Leading drone technology company PrecisionHawk announced it has raised $75 million in funding through a Series D backed by a list of high profile investors.

The round, which was led by Third Point Ventures, and included Comcast Ventures, Syngenta Ventures, DuPont, Indiana University’s Innovate Indiana Fund, Senator Investor Group, Constellation Technology Ventures, Intel Capital, Millennium Technology Value Partners, and others, brings PrecisionHawk’s total funding to date to more than $100 million, and makes the company the highest-capitalized commercial drone company in the industry.

This Series D dwarfs the company’s previous rounds, bringing in more than triple the funding raised by its $18 million Series C raised in April 2016, and its $10 million Series B in November 2014 combined.

Founded in 2010 in North Carolina, PrecisionHawk sells drone hardware, sensor technology, and provides analytics capabilities to its customers.  The company’s initial fixed-wing agricultural drone gathered aerial data from sensors installed by farmers across fields, however, the company has grown to offer additional services and to create platforms that can help farmers as well as other users gain more comprehensive data analysis and insight.

“Drones are not only replacing old information with more precise information, they are providing an entirely new layer that was previously unattainable or economically prohibitive to collect,” said  Michael Chasen, CEO, PrecisionHawk. “With advanced sensors such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and the analytics to interpret their outputs, organizations are gaining unprecedented visibility into their work. Ultimately, making them more profitable and sustainable.”

Day of the Drone

PrecisionHawk’s roots begin in agriculture, an industry that the company predicts will see a future value of drone-powered solutions of $32.4 billion – second only to infrastructure.  Meanwhile, in the short-term, Markets and Markets predicts that the agricultural drone industry will see a CAGR of 30.19 percent through 2022 to reach a value of $4.2 billion.

“Syngenta has been a PrecisionHawk customer since 2015 and has experienced first-hand the impact of the technology platform; both augmenting and replacing a variety of manual processes for more efficient and scalable operations,” said Katrin Burt, managing director of Syngenta’s venture capital group. “This investment reflects our commitment to advancing technologies that could have a real impact within agriculture and our excitement about the potential for PrecisionHawk to lead the commercial drone space across multiple industries.”

Although once held at arm’s distance by agricultural growers, the ongoing maturation of the category, advancements to analytic technologies, and the reduction in costs for hardware have resulted in drones gaining traction both in terms of adoption and investment dollars.

“Drones are increasingly providing valuable insights to businesses across a wide variety of industries, and PrecisionHawk is leading the way in many innovative and forward-thinking applications,” said ClearSky Managing Director James Goldinger, who has joined the PrecisionHawk board of directors.

Only days ago, SkySquirrel, a Halifax, Canada-based permanent crop-focused drone company, announced it had raised $3 million in follow-on funding backed by Innovacorp, an existing investor in the company, and an unnamed private investor from Ontario, Canada. The company also announced its merger with Napa Valley, California-based VineView Inc. to create a new aerial imaging and crop diagnostic company called VineView.

Other agricultural drone companies that have announced recent funding rounds and expansions include Seattle-based MicaSense, Switzerland’s Gamaya, Toronto-based Deveron, Japan’s Nileworks, as well as Sentera, Slantrange, and The Climate Corp.

Amid an atmosphere of increasing demand, PrecisionHawk has rapidly expanded over the past year as well, adding more than 100 new employees in 2017 and expanding its platform to better provide services to a wide range of industries.

“The fact that we were able to raise so much capital from a great series of investors… I think that’s showing how much of a focus and belief there is that this technology is really going to be something that isn’t just revolutionizing the drone industry, but that drones themselves–as the touch-all for industries like agriculture, construction, energy, insurance and government–can fundamentally change and improve the way that these companies do business,” PrecisionHawk CEO Michael Chasen told TechCrunch.

-Lynda Kiernan