Kamarul Muhamed, standing, 2nd from right, shaking hands with Soki Ohmae, board member of Drone Fund. Kotara Chiba, founder and general partner is to his left.
Global UAV service provider Aerodyne Ventures Sdn Bhd has announced receiving an undisclosed pre-Series B investment from Japan based drone company Drone Fund in deal which will consolidate their position in the Japanese market.
“We are thrilled and honoured to have Drone Fund as our investor. Aerodyne is currently blitz-scaling our way around the world and the collective experience, network and wisdom from all our stakeholders will be a paramount contributor to our ongoing success. Japan is an interesting and significant market for us and we look forward to working very closely with Drone Fund to make our vision a reality,”
says Kamarul Muhamed, cofounder and managing director of the Malaysian-based Aerodyne Group which has a presence in 23 countries with 260 staff including pilots, engineers, software developers and industry experts.
With Drone Fund having made over 20 investments into various drone companies todate, Malaysian based Aerodyne Group aims to tap this stable of innovative drone related startups and established technology partners to accelerate its growth.
Drone Fund’s investment into Aerodyne Group , comes from its Drone Fund 2, a US$45 million (RM184 million) size fund which counts among others, Japanese football star Keisuke Honda, as an investor.
Although the amount is undisclosed, the Aerodyne Group investment is one of the most significant that Drone Fund has made to date and brings together the global reach and experience of Aerodyne Group with the finest innovators and technology partners in the burgeoning Japanese drone industry.
“Drone Fund are very excited by our new alliance in Aerodyne Group. We believe that the utilisation and application of automated technologies is increasingly being realised, and the speed of its implementation is accelerating exponentially. This partnership with Aerodyne Group is important for the drone startups we have invested in to make further inroads into the growing Asian market and beyond. Aerodyne Group is a truly a leading industry solution provider with DaaS (Drone as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions that leverage the power of AI,” says Soki Ohmae, executive board member of Drone Fund
Aerodyne Group’s rapid growth, where it has completed over 48,000 flight operations, inspected more than 250,000 assets and surveyed in excess of 60,000 km of power infrastructure since 2015 has been fuelled by its development and extensive implementation of artificial intelligence (AI).
Access to the rapidly expanding Japanese domestic market for drone enterprise solutions and partnership with Drone Fund is an important step on the road towards achieving other long-term technology goals. The development of fully-autonomous UAV and BVLOS (Beyond Visual Line of Sight) technology is already front and centre of Aerodyne Group’s development roadmap, with live projects around the world incorporating nested drones, 5G connectivity and automated surveillance.
Source: DNA