SWOOP AERO
A former Air Force pilot and a robotics engineer are disrupting the logistics ecosystem with their sophisticated drone networks.
What is it? “We design, prototype and manufacture drones and develop the software that supports them to be deployed at scale,” says co-founder Eric Peck. Swoop Aero operates networks of drones in geographic “hubs” and claims to be the only end-to-end drone logistics platform in the world. “We currently operate on six continents and 4.5 million people get medical supplies delivered by our aircraft. Our goal is to reach 100 million people by 2025.”
Where did the idea come from? Former RAAF pilot Peck flew Hercules, the workhorse aircraft for moving people and cargo, often on humanitarian missions. Before Peck left the Air Force, he completed an MBA and later joined Deloitte. Co-founder Tepper is a mechatronics engineer. In 2017, alarmed by the WHO statistic that half the world’s population lacks access to basic healthcare, they wanted to develop a drone company to move medical supplies to remote areas. There were others trying to do the same thing but they were making “a delivery drone out of a toy”, says Peck. “We wanted to shrink the 70-tonne Hercules into a 25-kilo autonomous aeroplane, with software to automate it, so we could have one person looking after 70 drones, not 70 people looking after one Hercules.”
How did you get it off the ground (literally)? In 2018, Peck and Tepper went through the Startmate Accelerator program in Melbourne and won an open-tender contract for vaccine delivery in Vanuatu, funded by the local government and UNICEF. “I sold my house and moved to Vanuatu, got some more people on the team and started running a vaccine drone delivery service there.” That experience, he says, validated “the scale of the problem that we could solve” and the “opportunity for impact in developed and developing countries”. The Swoop Aero fleet continues to evolve. “The fourth-generation aircraft is the Kookaburra and the fifthgeneration is the Kite, which is designed to fly over rural and regional areas and also cities, with a range of 175 kilometres. Some components are made in Geelong, some in Bayswater and Western Sydney, and the aircraft are assembled in Port Melbourne.”
What have you learnt? Laser-like attention to customers and culture has, says Peck, allowed this small Australian company to punch above its weight internationally. “We’ve been extremely focused on creating a positive culture and hiring a diverse group of people, who can come together and solve seemingly impossible problems. It would have been really easy to hire 50 versions of me – white ex-military people. I didn’t think that would make a good drone company and we’ve proven that. If you get the right team and right culture, you can do pretty much anything.”
What’s next? Swoop Aero’s operations delivering medical supplies in African countries has built its reputation. Now it’s making prescription-to-the-door deliveries in regional Queensland. “In the next 18 months, the southern Queensland network will expand to cover about 150,000 square kilometres and 2.5 million people.” The company also plans to extend to seven African countries by 2025 and increase networks in developed economies. “We can leverage the work we’ve done in developing countries to build a big commercial business. That helps us to expand in Africa.”