San Francisco start-up steering future of drones
Airware hopes to ‘change the way we do our jobs’
Jonathan Downey was born into aviation. Now the son of two pilots is navigating the shimmering future of remote-controlled aircraft.
Downey is the founder and CEO of Airware, a San Francisco start-up that is designing hardware, software and data storage for commercial drones.
Downey compares Airware’s operating system that guides commercial drones to Windows, which enabled broad use of home computers. With Airware, remote pilots program flight paths from a tablet, while still being able to change plans during flight.
After tinkering for nearly four years — and raising more than $40 million in venture capital — Airware unveiled its system in April. Customers are now sizing up the company that has grown to about 80 staffers as the commercial drone industry begins to take flight.
“Commercial drones will change the way we do our jobs, improve our decision-making and save lives,” Downey says.
Airware is one of 10 finalists in USA TODAY’s Small Business Innovator of the Year contest. More nominee profiles will run in the coming months, and a winner will be announced in December.
Downey’s advice to other innovators is to find an opportunity to join high-growth start-ups to help prepare for creating your own. “Before diving into your own start-up, get your feet wet working for other start-ups in varying degrees of growth to best prepare you for managing and building your own company,” he says.
Part of Airware’s value is versatility. While most drone software is designed for specific fixed-wing planes or roto-copters, Airware aims to work in all sorts of aircraft. Power-line inspectors, for example, might need a plane to fly along miles of elevated line, while a copter could hover up and down near a specific tower.
Airware spent years developing its products. One client was the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, which boasts Africa’s largest black-rhino sanctuary with about 100 of the endangered animals. Drones could help staffers count the rhinos and discourage poachers across the 90,000-acre conservancy, where Airware staffers spent nearly two weeks conducting test flights in December 2013.
Testing the autopilot for a drone 25 miles away and 500 feet in the air was “fantastic,” says Robert Breare, the conservancy’s chief operating officer. When a tractor inadvertently cut a cable to the pilot’s antenna, the drone returned to its takeoff spot automatically, he said.
But Breare says cameras and thermal imaging are very expensive to get the resolution needed to track animals at night.
“It’s a really impressive autopilot system,” Breare says. “What we were looking for was absolute simplicity and something that could be operated by anyone, not necessarily a pilot, with total long-distance autonomy for the aircraft.”
Handling jobs that are dangerous and expensive in occupied aircraft is why the drone industry is expected to expand dramatically over the next decade.
The Federal Aviation Administration proposed long-awaited rules in February for small commercial drones. The rules could be finalized in late 2016, but the demand is reflected in the FAA’s approval of 822 exemptions by July 20 for drones to film movies, inspect pipelines and monitor agriculture. Thousands of other applications are pending.
The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, an industry advocacy group, projects 70,000 jobs will be created with $13.6 billion in economic activity during the first three years after the FAA finalizes its regulations for drones to share the skies with passenger planes.
Airware got started with help from incubators Lemnos Labs and Y-Combinator. Jeremy Conrad, a founding partner at Lemnos, knew Downey from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they recruited each other for science projects.
After graduation, Downey joined Boeing, working on the A160 Humingbird drone, while Conrad joined the Air Force building lasers and missiles.
In 2014, Airware raised more than $40 million in venture capital from Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers, First Round Capital, Google Ventures, GE Ventures and Intel Capital. GE Ventures is the company’s first large customer, but Delta Drone in France, Altavian in Florida, Allied Drones in California and Drone America in Nevada are also using the platform.
Drones combine Downey’s two passions of aviation and engineering.
Downey’s mother flew recreationally, and his father was a commercial pilot for Continental Airlines for 30 years. His father taught him how to fly after graduation from MIT. Downey got hired as a seasonal commercial pilot for Grand Canyon Airlines, flying tours from Las Vegas on a 19-passenger plane.
“It was gorgeous,” Downey said. “It’s probably the most fun flying you can get paid to do.”
Until now.