Volansi raises $50 million in Series B Funding to speed up middle-mile drone deliveries

VTOL drone man­u­fac­tur­er Volan­si has closed $50 mil­lion in a Series B round of fund­ing, allow­ing the com­pa­ny to expand its team and launch new projects in emerg­ing mar­kets in the USA and across the world.

In an announce­ment made today (Tues­day), this financ­ing round was led by Icon Ven­tures and includ­ed new investors Har­poon Ven­tures and Mer­ck Glob­al Health Inno­va­tion Fund. Exist­ing investors Light­speed Ven­ture Part­ners and YCombi­na­tor were also among the par­tic­i­pants. 

In addi­tion to the company’s fund­ing, Volan­si has also announced Joe Horowitz, Man­ag­ing Part­ner of Icon, and Bar­ry Eggers, Found­ing Part­ner of Light­speed, will both join its Board of Direc­tors.

Han­nan Parviz­ian, CEO and Co-Founder of Volan­si, said: “The com­bi­na­tion of our best in class car­go drones and unique soft­ware plat­form set us apart from oth­ers in the indus­try.

“Clos­ing our Series B with such high-qual­i­ty investors, espe­cial­ly dur­ing these chal­leng­ing times, is fur­ther tes­ta­ment to the ven­ture cap­i­tal community’s con­fi­dence in our busi­ness and will allow us to keep push­ing the enve­lope of mobil­i­ty and robot­ics.” 

Volan­si pro­vides auto­mat­ed point-to-point drone deliv­ery ser­vices for time-crit­i­cal parts and urgent med­ical sup­plies for enter­prise cus­tomers and the U.S. Depart­ment of Defense.

With $25 mil­lion of pri­or cap­i­tal pro­vid­ed by Light­speed and oth­er investors, Volan­si devel­oped and brought to mar­ket first-of-their-kind autonomous drones, the VOLY M20 and VOLY C10. 

The VOLY C10 can car­ry up to 10-pounds of car­go over 50 miles and has already per­formed oper­a­tions in Africa, the Caribbean, and the US.

While the VOLY M20 is a dual role air­craft with the abil­i­ty to simul­ta­ne­ous­ly car­ry up to 20-pounds of car­go, in addi­tion to 10-pounds of sen­sor pay­loads. It has a 350-mile range, a cruis­ing speed of 75 mph, and more than eight hours of endurance for sen­sor oper­a­tions.  

Horowitz said: “The drone mar­ket is very crowd­ed with all sorts of play­ers, but after get­ting to know Han­nan and his team and doing an exten­sive amount of due dili­gence, espe­cial­ly with Volansi’s key cus­tomers and dis­tri­b­u­tion part­ners, it became abun­dant­ly clear that the com­pa­ny is well-posi­tioned to rapid­ly build a huge busi­ness.

“We are par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed about Volansi’s unique abil­i­ty to address the med­ical com­mu­ni­ty with urgent vac­cine deliv­ery, par­tic­u­lar­ly in look­ing ahead to a post-COVID world.”  

Eggers added: “The Volan­si team has made sig­nif­i­cant progress since Light­speed led the com­pa­ny’s Series A back in 2019. We’ve been impressed by the lead­er­ship and team’s abil­i­ty to inno­vate and exe­cute, and we are look­ing for­ward to deep­en­ing our part­ner­ship dur­ing this next phase of growth.”

For more infor­ma­tion about Volan­si and its drones, vis­it https://volansi.com/