Today, SkySafe announced the close of its Seed round led by Andreesen Horowitz with our firm, Red Sea Ventures, participating along other great investors we’re proud to be co-investing with. SkySafe is building defense systems to prevent unauthorized drones from entering private or public spaces. Through SkySafe, security operators will be able to (1) detect and (2) disable or take over control of drones as they enter the protected airspace in real time. The spaces that SkySafe intends to protect include stadiums, airports, prisons, universities, public infrastructure, etc… This is obviously not a consumer solution but I wouldn’t be surprised to see a celebrity purchase an installation to protect their home.
At Red Sea Ventures, we’ve been thinking a lot about the power of drone technology and its far reaching implications on the world: enabling advancements in agriculture, surveillance and security, entertainment, and delivery of critical supplies to hard to reach places (medication for example). But with 2.5M drones projected to be sold in the US this year at $500-1000 a piece, these devices will inevitably fall into the hands of more bad actors who will threaten public safety either through negligence or malice. Just this week we were reminded of how important systems to defend against drones will be when a British Airways plane was hit by a drone at Heathrow Airport. This is unfortunately not an isolated case. In the last year the FAA has reported almost 600 incidents of drones in US airspace.
Against this evolving landscape and growing market we have been looking for opportunities to support entrepreneurs building businesses in this space.Julian first met the team in November and as soon as we had a chance to dig in with Grant and the SkySafe team, we realized we’d found a rare instance of Founder/Market fit capable of delivering on this complex technical challenge and ambitious vision. The team comes at the problem with highly technical backgrounds as engineers who worked on anti-drone systems of the US Air Force and strong business minds intensely focused on solving the problem of security in a way that allows Drone technology to flourish without sacrificing the safety we all seek.
We look forward to continuing to working with Grant and the team at SkySafe to support their vision to secure the skies above.
- Originally posted on Medium