We've only just scratched the surface of what drones can do and how ubiquitous they will become. Even industrially speaking, that holds, as they promise to take over all risky human activities, especially inspection at heights.
Such a space is operated by the Swiss startup Voliro: flying robots inspect wind turbines, structures over water, and other infrastructure hazardous for humans to reach due to height and weather conditions.
That's more than a glance to see if the hull is riddled with corrosion; Voliro's drones can poke around with sensors that can do dry film thickness, often making it unnecessary to bring people in on ropes. But you wouldn't expect CEO Florian Gutzwiller to reveal how many labor casualties the company's drones are preventing. "I'm Swiss.". Even if I were an American CEO, I would say we are saving lives every day, but I think it's too aggressive," he said to TechCrunch.
Putting cultural differences aside, Gutzwiller has another reason to focus on other aspects instead of accident prevention, such as productivity: industrial inspections cause downtime, and avoiding this can save Voliro's clients, such as Chevron and Holcim, as well as inspection and maintenance service providers, a very considerable amount of money.
One of my favorite examples, Gutzwiller said, was flare stacks. "Because a flare stack is hot, you have to turn it off. You have to cool it down. You have to build a scaffold. Then you do the inspection. After doing the inspection, remove the scaffold, and then turn it on again. This can be a matter of days or weeks, and we can do it in 20 minutes.".
Gutzwiller believes Airobotics stands head to head among its closest competitors, namely Avestec, Flyability, and Skygauge, due to the company's versatility in hardware. Among those are sensors resistant to heat, combined with the core innovation it is based on: the tiltable rotor that gives 360-degree freedom of motion to its robots, meaning they can work on ceilings and apply pressure without losing stability.
Developed by some of the individuals at Voliro who were part of the Autonomous Systems Lab at ETH Zurich, the high-end rotor predates the startup spinoff in 2019. Three years later, it launched commercially available drones, but what it sells isn't that: Its B2B subscription business model is what it has built.
This model has many advantages, Gutzwiller said. For customers, it means accessing hardware and software upgrades as they come off the design table, in addition to getting support. For the company, it means recurring revenue that can fund R&D and show the kind of cash flow investors like to see.
The company has only just raised $12 million, and the reason may be that fundraising is relatively tough for startups and robotics. The total funding so far is $22 million. According to the company, leading this round of financing were Cherry Ventures with their existing business angels, family offices, and adding a conventional debt facility as a minority element of the round.
Commercial traction helped VCs and bankers, but it still had a degree of luck and serendipity. Voliro pitched numerous VC firms, as it does nowadays, but hadn't pitched Cherry Ventures until a Mexican entrepreneur Gutzwiller bumped into randomly at a mountain bus stop recommended that he do so. Fast forward a few months later, and Cherry led the Series A round for Voliro.
Gutzwiller's association with Voliro was also a fluke. After opening his company Open Systems to private equity in 2017, Gutzwiller became an angel investor, but he didn't stop at investing into the ETH spinoff: He became the entrepreneur-in-residence at the company before becoming the executive chairman of Voliro, and then he took over for former CEO Mina Kamel in November 2022.
Now, Gutzwiller is in charge of spearheading the growth of the business, and he's bullish on its platform approach. Third-party sensors will soon be supported, for instance, to detect corrosion under insulation, but in the longer term, the overall approach could move further towards repair. For example, by having its robots remove rust or add coating to themselves. But this will first be preceded by work from the company in expanding its client base across oil and gas and energy and other industry sectors that can stand to benefit from needing less human work at height.