Skydio HQ Tour: Skydio Commits $3.5 Billion to Expand U.S. Manufacturing

0:00So on average now in public safety our customers are flying once every 30 seconds and that's what yeah so almost every minute now there's some story like this where there's like a missing person or a stolen vehicle and the drone getting there quickly just fundamentally changes outcomes. It's really life-saving technology. People don't really understand how deployed and impactful these things already are so I'm excited to talk about that. Customers use the term force multiplier. Basically, you can have the drones be doing autonomous actions on your behalf, and this is where the AI and autonomy piece comes in.

0:33I think we're headed for a Jetsons-like future where we just have drones doing all kinds of useful stuff. This campus is slowly evolving into drone mecha. Our goal is to just have this be the most exciting place in the world.

0:57So this is what the future of drone use looks like. So the old way of flying a drone was like, you hold a controller, you need to be a skilled pilot. If you know what you're doing, you can do useful stuff. The new way is the drones live in these network connected charging base stations, we call them docks. And they're just available to fly 24 seven. So these things are flying themselves fully autonomously. There's no person in the loop. The dock keeps them charged, connected to the network. It'll heat them, it'll cool them, it'll do whatever it needs to do. And it basically turns them into flying robot infrastructure, where the person who uses them never has to touch them, never has to physically interact with the hardware.

1:34It's a little bit just like using a cloud server. And it puts the drones in a position to just constantly do useful work for people in the background. And it's a fully autonomous robotic system. Are they going on a mission right now? What are they doing? Yeah, they're flying pre-programmed missions now. So the number one feature for us is reliability, like making this stuff work end-to-end, bulletproof, day, night, wind, rain. That's the hard part. And so these things are our testing rig. They're just continuously flying 24-7, getting as many cycles as we can in every condition. But it's mimicking, of course, what our customers do in their environments.

2:12So these things are deployed at energy utilities, at construction companies, for law enforcement and public safety, for base security and our customers expect them to work all the time and so that's what we're we're testing here when you decided to put these up here why did you decide how many are up here and are they all different in some capacity or they all do the same thing well we really want as many as we can we have drones doing different jobs up here so we have what we call our endurance rig which is this line here yeah so these ones are just constantly available for autonomous testing We have others over there that we're using to give customer demos.

2:48So the best way for customers to understand what the product can do is to fly it themselves and see different representative missions. And so our sales team, which is all over the country, all over the world, they're constantly logging in and flying those docks over there. You know, in software, there's this idea of continuous integration. Like one of the big evolutions over the last decade in software engineering is just getting faster and faster feedback cycles. when you write a piece of code, you can deploy it and test it very quickly. And I think this is one of the first examples of doing that in real life with hardware.

3:20Because we have this fully autonomous device, we don't need people to be in the loop of testing. So you can sort of think of this as like continuous integration for our development process with real autonomous hardware in the loop. Okay, so we are at the headquarters. Yeah. How is the headquarters set up? We're going to go through a couple different things today. What's the flow? Yeah, so I wanted to start here because this is the end result. Making all this stuff work the way that it is right now is super hard and that's what the vast majority of the company is focused on is just making these things work in a reliable way.

3:55We will give you a feel for what it's like to actually fly one of these things remotely. We'll look at some of the new vehicles we're developing, which I'm super excited about. We'll show you kind of the like ultimate stress testing rigs that we use to put these things through the paces. And then I'm excited to talk about, you know, the impact that this is already having today with customers. Because I think because the industries we serve are a little bit out of sight, you know, people don't think a lot about what is Caltrans doing to keep the roads safe or what is PG &E doing to inspect their infrastructure.

4:29People don't really understand how deployed and impactful these things already are. So I'm excited to talk about that. Amazing. Okay. Sweet.

4:42Is this one of your first drones? Yeah. So this is an artifact from my arguably misspent childhood. So I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes. And this is like... Oh, it has your name on it. Yeah, because I was a pilot. So this is like an extreme... You fit in there? No. Although you could put a small child in there. So this is like... Most people don't even know this exists. This is kind of a crazy hobby. And I was really lucky to be doing it because a lot of the things that I learned there, certainly about building these things, it's a little bit like NASCAR where a big part of success in competition is like the engineering and design of the aircraft itself.

5:18And then the other half is how well you can fly it. So I learned a lot about building these things. Then I also learned a lot just at an intuitive level about aerodynamics and control systems, which is what got me interested in engineering. this plane has been crashed. So there's a maneuver, people call it a torque roll, where you basically, they have such extreme thrust of weight that they can hover just on the propeller. So the plane comes in, it hovers on the propeller, and I forgot to put gas in it. So I was flying it like two feet off the ground, and I ran out of gas. And so it came down, smashed the tail, and I had a major competition like three months later, so we had to do some emergency repairs.

5:56And then the color scheme was just something that I came up with. I think it was actually from the Atlanta Thrashers ice hockey team. They're not even around anymore, but I thought they had a cool color scheme. This is awesome. Yeah.

6:10So have you ever flown a drone before? I have not. All right. You're going to do a lot of drone flying today. Oh, boy. So you saw the docks up on the rooftop. But most of the people, the whole point is that most of the people that are flying a dock drone never have to physically touch it, interact with it. You don't even need to be in the same zip code or country. If you have an internet connection, you can fly it. So this is a piece of software we call DFR command. Drone is first responder command. So this is designed for emergency response. And this is the interface that most of our customers experience drones through now.

6:42So you've got kind of the map of the world. This is our office park. And then it's unfortunately a crime-ridden office park. Oh, no. Exactly. What kind of crime you got here? Well, we can click around and see. Somebody improperly parked over in the field. got a suspicious vehicle. But in a real environment, these would be 911 calls that are coming in. So the incident 911 call happens, it'll appear on this map. The operator would see a description of it. And then it's at their discretion if they think drone could have an impact. So if I want to respond to, for example, this suspicious vehicle, I'll just click over here, respond here, select the drone that I want.

7:20And one of those docks on the rooftop is now opening up. Oh, wow. Yeah, so you can see the rooftop of the dock opening up, all the software is booting up, and it's autonomously planning a path to figure out where it needs to go. So I just click launch, and that's it. With one click now, the drone's taking off. It uses a wayfinding technology we've developed called Pathfinder, so it knows where buildings, terrain, everything, airspace regulations, and it can autonomously fly its way out there. We want this campus to be a little window into the future. But I think we're headed for a Jetsons-like future where we just have drones continuously flying, doing all kinds of useful stuff for us.

8:01When you got this building, did you have to get certain licenses? Well, we get permission from the FAA to do this. So there's this concept of flying beyond visual line of sight, which basically means that the old way of flying a drone is you have somebody who's holding a controller looking at the drone, and the regulations were originally written with that in mind. For us and for all of our customers, we get what's called a Beyond Visual Line of Sight or BB loss waiver to do what we're doing here, where I can't see this drone, but it's still safe and legal to fly it. And we always make friends with our neighbors.

8:37Neighbors generally come to love the drones. So now that it's gotten to the incident, I can take control and fly it around. So here's the part where you fly. Oh, interesting. Okay. Have you ever played a video game like Counter-Strike or anything? Nope. Not at all. We're gonna test the learning curve. So the first thing to do, if you just use the mouse, you can look around. Oh, well, I just... yeah. Okay. So if you wanna like, you go down, you'll see the road. And it just, wherever you point it? Wherever you point it goes. When I was at Archer, I went to Archer and I did a helicopter simulator.

9:12Yeah. And then I did the Archer simulator. Yeah. I will never fly a helicopter. This does seem easier than a helicopter, I will give you that. Yeah. So now you're looking around. If you want to fly around, you use these keys like arrow keys. So you can put your left hand there and then W forward. So you hold W, you go forward. What's the furthest we can go? So we have a geofence here, this green line. So you just keep holding forward, it'll keep you safe. The software is designed such that you really can't mess it up. Like it's got onboard collision avoidance, a bunch of AI and autonomy stuff that's keeping you safe.

9:48And it's really important for our customers because we want them thinking about the mission. We don't want them having to think about being like a skilled expert drone pilot. So the other thing that can be fun to do, if you hold space bar, you'll go up. You can just hold it all the way. Yeah, it's really powerful cameras on these things. So you can zoom in, read a license plate at 800 feet, detect a person at a couple miles. But one of my favorite things to do is just grab a car. So if you point down at the road here. I am really waving this mouse around. Yeah. So now you're hands off. Targeted.

10:25So now this car is being tracked. So we see its location on the map. The drone is autonomously following it without you having to do anything. And this is one of these things, like the customer uses the term force multiplier. But basically you can have the drones be doing autonomous actions on your behalf without you having to be doing low-level control. And this is where the AI and autonomy piece comes in. Like our goal is to build the skills of an expert pilot into the drone. And then it just traces the geofence? Yep, so it'll follow the geofence. It'll eventually run out of room here because we've got it fenced in.

11:03It can't leave our corporate campus. But this stuff is super powerful in the hands of the critical industries that depend on drones like this. So in a use case scenario, we're on a high-speed pursuit. Does this happen quite frequently? Yeah, yeah. So on average now in public safety, our customers are flying once every 30 seconds. What? Yeah. I mean, this is across the nation 24-7. So almost every minute now there's some story like this where there's like a missing person or a stolen vehicle or a potentially armed suspect. And the drone getting there quickly and getting that real-time information just fundamentally changes outcomes because officers on the ground know what they're heading into.

11:47They can get better information quickly. They can send the right kind of response for whatever the situation demands. And it's really life-saving technology. It's like this is the most meaningful, motivating stuff for us. Like every day now we hear some story where, you know, there's somebody who had an overdose. There was an anonymous call. They had no idea where this person was. They used the drone to find him in a couple minutes, got there, did CPR, saved his life. And without the drone, like it probably would have taken him a couple hours to find this person. And that's just happening all the time.

12:14So right now we just flew one drone. The other aspect of this, which is really important, is being able to fly multiple drones at the same time. So if I say I want to do an inspection, I have this, this is like sort of another corner of application. So I have this pre-planned mission where we've got all these transmission towers, or on our campus they're just distribution poles. On customer site they can be transmission towers. We know where they are. We pre-mapped them so we know the location of all the poles. and then I've got this, we call it asset-centric inspection, but this mission that'll go off and do those inspections.

12:59So I just say, yep, this looks good, I want to run it, I can see the mission there in 3D, and I'm gonna kick off a second drone now to go and do that flight. The first one is still in the air, so it's a little bit just like playing a multiplayer video game or something where you have multiple agents out there that are doing work on your behalf. So we click launch and the second drone is now going to launch itself and go and execute the inspection mission. And we actually see a lot of these things coming together with customers. So site security is our biggest, fastest growing application where they do a combination of responding to incidents.

13:34But if you think about a data center where you'd be doing site security with one of these, you also have a ton of infrastructure that needs inspecting. Like it could be power infrastructure, it could be cooling infrastructure. And so being able to use the same asset to respond to incidents as well as inspect stuff that would be much slower, more dangerous for people to do on the ground is very, very powerful. So this thing's out now, and it's basically just capturing a pre-programmed set of shots that we know we need to document. So it's going after this distribution pole here, and it has a very precise set of motions that it needs to do to get all the data to know if that thing is in a good healthy state.

14:17Just to be clear, these ones are not armed. I talk to a lot of defense companies. Yeah, yeah. These are unarmed drones, yes. These are basically flying sensor platforms. And we sell very similar products to the military. Our class of drones in the military is what they call ISR, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance. So it's basically the same thing. It's a flying sensor platform. I mean, I think there's a lot happening in the drone space and the competition with China, the national security stakes, the military applications, I think are super important and we're involved in that stuff. We're proud to work with the military.

14:53But I think there's this whole other already large-scale, massive impact set of applications that are really life-saving things that most people don't see and appreciate. And for us, it's pretty horizontal technology. I mean, it's like building a computer or something. You can use it for all different kinds of things. It's really the software that defines, you know, how you interact with it and what the capabilities are. Probably the single biggest, I would say, positive surprise that I've had over the last five years is the level of community acceptance and buy-in and really excitement for the law enforcement application of these things.

15:29And I think the credit really goes to our customers, our law enforcement customers. There's just an extreme degree of transparency here. So when a new agency launches their drone program, they're doing everything they can to be vocal and proactive about what they're doing. The chief will oftentimes hold a press conference. They'll show the drones. They'll show examples of how they're using it. And then we also have a product feature called the Transparency Portal where they can publish the flying that they're doing for people in their community, anybody in their community, to go and log in and see where they flew and why they did it.

15:58And I think when people see it, they get it. It's pretty hard to argue with. When you see videos of it like finding an injured person or catching a suspect fleeing a scene or finding out that the person was holding a broomstick, not a gun, it's really life-saving stuff. And there are real concerns about privacy. But I think the best answer to privacy is actually transparency as well for agencies to be accountable for the flying that they're doing and for the public to be able to see it to make sure that they're not spying on somebody in their backyard. When I was walking in here, and even in this room, you definitely have some trophies and some other things that you'd like to show off.

16:30Yeah. OK, so what is going on here? So there's a big challenger coin culture with a lot of our customers. So most agencies, most people don't know this, but police agencies, they call them challenger coins. But they're basically the logo, the brand of the agency that's using it. Some of my favorites, we'll see if we have any in here, our drones are starting to show up on more and more of these challenger coins. Oh, no way. For the drone teams, which is a fun thing to see. So these are some of the agencies that we work with. What's your favorite? I can't name a favorite. That one's pretty intense.

17:06The one that's a drone itself? Yeah. Yeah, that's a good one. We like that one. Sorcery is brought to you by Brex, the financial stack trusted by more than 30 ,000 companies, including one in three venture-backed startups in the U.S. Nearly 40 % of startups fail because they run out of cash. Brex is literally built to help founders avoid that. Unlike traditional banks that let your money sit idle, chipping away at it with fees, Brex's designs help you spend smarter and move faster. Their all-in-one solution combines checking, treasury, and FDIC protection into one powerful account. You can send and receive money globally at lightning speeds, get 20 times the standard FDIC coverage through their partner banks, and even high yield from day one.

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19:02Thank you.

19:31This beast we call the windwall. This is a fully autonomous testing rig. So this is again just running unattended 24-7. So it's a bunch of drone propellers that generate 30-35 miles an hour wind and then we've got a docks sitting in front of it. So we can create all kinds of extreme wind conditions here. We can put the dock in different orientations. We've even built variations of this where we can rain on it.

20:32That's a good way to start the morning.

20:39So this building is the domain of R10, which is a new drone for us and it's specifically designed for indoor operation. So a lot of the most dangerous work in public safety and in critical infrastructure inspection happens indoors in very confined spaces. And it's actually kind of natural habitat for us because our drones have computer vision AI. They can map the environment. They can fly in challenging spaces. But we didn't have a drone form factor that was exactly right for that. So over the last year, we've run a super fast, awesome program to build our first specially designed indoor drone.

21:20So it looks like Ben's got some math up there. Can we look at some of the design of R10? Yeah, Ben's an OG. He's been with us 11 years? Yeah, since almost the beginning. Since the semi-legal house in Atherton that was our first office. In Atherton. And actually when the owner found out what we were doing, he wondered if we would pay the rent in equity. which luckily we did not do. He would have been happy about it. So Ben's played a major role in designing every drone we've ever made. I don't know, do you want to take us for a spin on what we're looking at here? Yeah, sure, yeah. I guess you haven't flown this yet, but you're going to fly this.

21:56We'll fly in a bit. Nice to meet you. And basically we wanted to build something that is small that we could possibly make a drone for indoor flying that has a couple of the features that customers really want. like it's got headlights so you can see in the darkness the speaker microphone super robust easy to fly portable kind of checks all the boxes for indoor tactical sort of scenarios so this is what that looks like so our computer system is all in the middle we have cameras along the front for the user to see what they're looking at but also for the obstacle avoidance system to work it has a bunch of lights like these new diodes here that'll illuminate a really dark space really nicely microphones, it's got a speaker on the back.

22:37The thing that I think is, we were talking about how hard it is to make these things. Drones can be, they can fool people because it's like, oh, it's small, it's kind of like a piece of electronics or something. But designing these things is really akin to designing a rocket ship or an aircraft because there's just so much physical constraint, vibrations, thermals, aerodynamics. And because it's small, it's actually harder. Most of the ways that you solve problems in engineering is you add weight like oh we have a thermal problem the way we'll fix that is we'll just like add a giant heat sink on it you can't do that on a drone or if you do it you're going to pay a cost in terms of flight time and performance and so it's this awesome game of just making every gram and every part count as much as it can and basically if you do it well you're up against the laws of physics in every dimension these things just operate right at the edge of what's physically possible to get as much capability as you can into a small easy form factor.