Flyby Robotics Drone Delivery Secures USD4 million in Seed Funding, Promises USD3 Dollars Transportation Fee

The drone deliv­ery indus­try is heat­ing up in this hot­ly con­test­ed mar­ket as yet anoth­er com­pa­ny, Fly­by Robot­ics, flex­es its mus­cles after secur­ing USD4 mil­lion in seed fund­ing, reports a press release.

The round was led by MaC Ven­ture Cap­i­tal, with par­tic­i­pa­tion from Week­end Fund, Anthemis, and Evening Fund. Oth­er strate­gic investors include Naval Ravikant, (co-Founder of Angel­List); Bal­a­ji Srini­vasan, (Finance and for­mer CTO of Coin­base) and Karen Pritzker’s VC fund.

Los Ange­les-based Fly­by Robot­ics was co-Found­ed by polit­i­cal refugee, Jason Lu, in 2020 after meet­ing Amer­i­can Cat Orman while both stu­dents at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. The com­pa­ny is build­ing end-to-end automa­tion for drone deliv­ery, sup­port­ed by a team of engi­neers from Yale, NASA’s Jet Propul­sion Lab­o­ra­to­ry and Anduril. Present­ly Fly­by has a team of 10 peo­ple.

Jason Lu and Cat Orman

Lu explains, “You don’t have to be a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar cor­po­ra­tion or a glob­al mil­i­tary super­pow­er to reap the eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits of autonomous drones. Our AI-pow­ered autonomous sys­tems allow any mer­chant to dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduce the cost of deliv­ery to their cus­tomers.”

Fly­by has already set-up a num­ber of part­ner­ships with food retail­ers and snack brands across the U.S. These include Nek­ter Smooth­ies Juice Bar, MAD Greens, a col­lec­tive sal­ad bar, Tokyo Joe’s, a sushi out­let, and crunchy shi­itake mush­room chips from Popadelics.

Dur­ing a recent month-long tri­al in Phoenix, Ari­zona, where the city of Mesa was cho­sen, cus­tomers of par­tic­i­pat­ing retail­ers were able to order drone deliv­ery for just USD3 via the retail­ers’ apps. Employ­ees loaded food from a launch site set up in two park­ing areas and cus­tomers expe­ri­enced deliv­ery times aver­ag­ing under 4 min­utes.

The tri­al was sup­port­ed by Ari­zona State University’s (ASU) Cen­tre for Smart Cities and Regions. Oth­er sup­port­ers includ­ed May­ors Giles of Mesa and Orte­ga of Scotts­dale and Michael Sher­wood, Chief Inno­va­tion Offi­cer at the City of Las Vegas. 

Dr. Diana Bow­man (cred­it: ASU)

Dr. Diana Bow­man, Asso­ciate Dean and Pro­fes­sor of ASU, com­ment­ed, “Fly­by’s entrance into the Mesa mar­ket fur­ther enhances the Greater Phoenix region’s vision to be the smartest and most con­nect­ed area not only in the Unit­ed States but across the world.”

She con­tin­ued, “The launch in the city was viewed as a par­a­digm shift in food deliv­ery ser­vices, allow­ing cus­tomers to not only more eas­i­ly con­nect with local restau­rants, but also receive their fresh food faster.”

The retail­ers involved were excit­ed by the tri­al. Steve Schulze, co-founder and CEO, Nek­ter Juice Bar, enthused, “Our com­pa­ny has always pushed for­ward to the fore­front of tech­nol­o­gy to improve the guest expe­ri­ence, start­ing with our best-in-class app with more than 1.3 mil­lion loy­al­ty mem­bers and user-friend­ly online order­ing capa­bil­i­ties. We are now con­tin­u­ing that tra­di­tion of inno­va­tion work­ing with future-look­ing com­pa­nies like Fly­by.”

Nick D’Antonio,VP of IT at Sal­ad Col­lec­tive, remarked, ”Over the course of the pilot, we learned that deliv­er­ing food direct­ly to our near­by guests with­out a car or a deliv­ery dri­ver is pos­si­ble. It was fun to watch our team and guests light up as they watched orders tak­ing off from the launch pad or being deliv­ered from the sky to their homes.”

The pre-seed fund­ing will help devel­op a Lev­el 4 auton­o­my for Fly­by’s flight sys­tems, which cur­rent­ly per­form at Lev­el 3. At Lev­el 4 drones oper­ate with­out any human inter­ven­tion through­out the deliv­ery process, but allow a pilot in a remote com­mand cen­tre the option to man­u­al­ly over­ride if required.

Mar­i­lyn Yang, co-founder and CEO of Fun-Gal Snacks, the par­ent com­pa­ny of Popadelics, remarked, “We see many future pos­si­bil­i­ties for our brand in part­ner­ship with Fly­by. Drone deliv­ery has the poten­tial to reduce traf­fic, height­en tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment in the region, and pro­vide more sus­tain­able deliv­ery infra­struc­ture.”

Fly­by has already devel­oped an indus­try-lead­ing pack­age deploy­ment sys­tem, which gen­tly winch­es prod­ucts down from a hov­er­ing drone to cus­tomers’ doorsteps from a height of 100 to 150 ft. The sys­tem allows Fly­by to deliv­er frag­ile prod­ucts like smooth­ies with­out spilling a drop.

Using third par­ty drones for now that cost around USD8,000 each with a deliv­ery range of up to three miles, Fly­by aims to oper­ate under pro­posed FAA Part 108 reg­u­la­tions using BVLOS along­side ground sta­tions that mon­i­tor the local air­space.

The com­pa­ny is look­ing to expand its ser­vices to Los Ange­les, Las Vegas and Arkansas by the end of the year.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.flybydev.com/

(Top image and oth­ers: Fly­by Robot­ics)