Iris Automation closes $13 million in Series B funding and continues to progress its detect-and-avoid system

Iris Automa­tion, a devel­op­er of advanced detec­tion sys­tems for unmanned air­craft, has closed a suc­cess­ful round of $13 mil­lion in Series B ven­ture cap­i­tal fund­ing.

The fund­ing includes fol­low-on invest­ment by Besse­mer Ven­ture Part­ners, Bee Part­ners, OCA Ven­tures, and new investors Sony Inno­va­tion Fund and Ver­i­zon Ven­tures.

This will also con­tin­ue to improve detec­tion and clas­si­fi­ca­tion capa­bil­i­ties of Iris’ Casia sys­tem, to sup­port expand­ed use cas­es, oper­a­tional envi­ron­ments and air­craft com­pat­i­bil­i­ty. As well as this, the added invest­ment will expand machine learn­ing and AI capa­bil­i­ties and test­ing — to improve and extend the Casia system’s per­for­mance enve­lope.  

Jon Damush, CEO of Iris Automa­tion, said: “We are incred­i­bly excit­ed about this show of sup­port from our cur­rent and new investors, par­tic­u­lar­ly dur­ing this unprece­dent­ed glob­al pan­dem­ic.

“We have always known that our approach to the prob­lem solves a crit­i­cal miss­ing link for unpilot­ed sys­tems, and plan to deploy this cap­i­tal to fur­ther expand our capa­bil­i­ties and improve safe­ty for unpilot­ed sys­tems as glob­al reg­u­la­tors work to inte­grate UAS into exist­ing air­spaces. The invest­ment clear­ly illus­trates investor con­fi­dence in growth of the sec­tor and specif­i­cal­ly Iris’ role in the ecosys­tem.” 

Addi­tion­al­ly, Iris Automa­tion will con­tin­ue to par­tic­i­pate in the FAA’s BEYOND pro­gramme, which is focused on enabling Beyond Visu­al Light of Sight (BVLOS) oper­a­tions with Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tems to advance air­space inte­gra­tion.

BEYOND will demon­strate oper­a­tions that are repeat­able, scal­able and eco­nom­i­cal­ly viable with spe­cif­ic empha­sis on infra­struc­ture inspec­tion, pub­lic safe­ty oper­a­tions and small pack­age deliv­ery. 

The lat­est invest­ment reflects the con­tin­ued growth at Iris Automa­tion, which recent­ly con­duct­ed a live drone flight demon­stra­tion for the City of Reno Fire Depart­ment of its Casia onboard (DAA) col­li­sion avoid­ance sys­tem, under the FAA’s UAS Inte­gra­tion Pilot Pro­gram (IPP).

This close­ly fol­lowed Trans­port Cana­da also hav­ing issued the sec­ond Spe­cial Flight Oper­a­tions Cer­tifi­cate (SFOC) for BVLOS flights in uncon­trolled air­space util­is­ing infra­struc­ture mask­ing and Iris Automation’s Casia sys­tem to MVT Geo-solu­tions. 

Casia 360 is the first com­mer­cial­ly avail­able 360 degree radi­al com­put­er vision Detect-and-Avoid sys­tem for UAS. Iris Automa­tion uses indus­tri­al cam­eras onboard drones to observe and inter­pret the world for full sit­u­a­tion­al aware­ness of the oper­a­tional envi­ron­ment.

The tech­nol­o­gy imme­di­ate­ly process­es infor­ma­tion about intrud­er air­craft and Iris Automa­tion’s pro­pri­etary algo­rithms make intel­li­gent deci­sions in real-time. 

Tess Hatch, vice pres­i­dent of Besse­mer Ven­ture and Iris Automa­tion board mem­ber, added: “One day drones will ubiq­ui­tous­ly oper­ate in our air­space mak­ing our lives safer, eas­i­er, and bet­ter, and Iris Automa­tion is the key to unlock­ing the full poten­tial of com­mer­cial oper­a­tions.

“Enabling drones to fly beyond visu­al line of sight helps expand a myr­i­ad of oper­a­tions from inspect­ing oil pipelines and rail­road tracks to agri­cul­tur­al farms to last mile deliv­ery, and makes all of those oper­a­tions much more effi­cient and less expen­sive.”