{"id":10207,"date":"2018-01-22T16:48:16","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T15:48:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chartmogul.com\/blog\/?p=10207"},"modified":"2023-08-10T17:11:31","modified_gmt":"2023-08-10T15:11:31","slug":"dronedeploy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chartmogul.com\/blog\/dronedeploy\/","title":{"rendered":"DroneDeploy uses ChartMogul to perform top-down analyses of target industries"},"content":{"rendered":"

A farmer in the field trying to understand what’s happening with his crops.<\/em><\/p>\n

A construction worker trying to check progress on his job site or make design plans and track them against progress.<\/em><\/p>\n

An Insurance inspector tasked with assessing damage to a site such as from a natural disaster.<\/em><\/p>\n

What do all of these scenarios have in common?<\/p>\n

They can all benefit from aerial data.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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DroneDeploy<\/a> serves all of the above industries and more. The company has played a central part in making drones and advanced drone technology accessible to businesses in need of aerial data. In many ways, the massively-varied list above is symptomatic of the drone industry radical explosion in availability of low cost technology.<\/p>\n

After Hurricane Harvey and the subsequent flooding in Houston, DroneDeploy began working with drone operators<\/a> on the ground to help assess damage. Speeding up this process is critical in getting insurance payouts moving and getting people back into their homes. When it comes to doing meaningful work, it doesn\u2019t get much more compelling than that.<\/p>\n

I paid them a visit in their San Francisco headquarters to chat to Devon Tackels (marketing) and Kevin Charette (operations), to understand how a SaaS company serving such a diverse customer base is able to make decisions and maintain focus.<\/p>\n

\"image<\/p>\n

About DroneDeploy<\/h1>\n

DroneDeploy is the leading cloud software platform for commercial drones. While relatively inexpensive drone hardware is making the technology available to businesses everywhere, DroneDeploy\u2019s mission is to make aerial data from such technology accessible for everyone.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really a combination of the ease and low cost of capturing aerial data, plus the advance in capability for analyzing it that\u2019s driving the core of DroneDeploy\u2019s mission. Drones, and the data they capture, are enabling big leaps in land assessment from the air \u2014 whether for agricultural analysis, disaster assessment, construction site evaluation, you name it. This technology allows businesses to do more in an automated fashion, with less risk and<\/em> lower cost.<\/p>\n

Founded by Mike Winn, Jono Millin and Nicholas Pilkington in 2013, DroneDeploy was born out of an effort to help catch illegal poachers in South Africa. In 2013 consumer drone technology was just starting to take off.<\/p>\n

Kevin and Devon explained some of the challenges in running a drone operation back then:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was extremely difficult and expensive to do aerial photography and mapping. You’d have to create an entire ground station with PCs in the field, antennas that were entirely self-built. Also there was no software to easily manage all of this tech.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Things have changed over the past few years, thanks to advancements in battery technology, mobile computing power and manufacturing.<\/p>\n

“Today, you can go to Best Buy and buy a DJI Phantom 4, which is one of the most powerful drones out there. We are the software platform of choice for some of the leading drone products in the world.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The company attracts a lot of aeronautical engineers, helicopter pilots, plane pilots and aerial photography people. In general, most employees have an underlying interest in drones. Some employees also moved to the company from Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and map making industries.<\/p>\n

\"DroneDeploy<\/p>\n

Moving drones to the cloud<\/h1>\n

SaaS was a clear choice from the get-go with DroneDeploy \u2014 the founders knew that much of the value in such technology would lie in a cloud-based solution capable of processing, manipulating and analyzing aerial data on a larger scale than was possible before.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat differentiates us from other drone software solutions is our cloud-based approach \u2014 we do everything in the cloud. One of the cool things about this is that we have insight into the kind of applications people are using our software for and what types of problems they have.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today, DroneDeploy manages the end-to-end process of obtaining and using aerial data. Its software:<\/p>\n