Skydio Raises $110M Series F at $4.4B Valuation | CEO Adam Bry

[00:00] There's no other company in the world that has the combination of true cutting-edge sci-fi technology in a real business that's really working in life-saving critical missions. And so it's that combination of cutting-edge AI and robotics meets hard industries with high stakes. That's like the crucible out of which Skydio is forged. How has AI transformed the business? From a product perspective, the course that we're charting is towards flying agentic AI that can have the intelligence and domain expertise. [00:30] in five years is if there's an emergency, you call 911, a drone shows up in a few seconds, and that's going to be everywhere in the U.S., hopefully everywhere in the world. What is your hottest take? I think we're at this magical moment where you can have... [00:54] Adam, welcome to Sorcery. Great to be here. Although, really, welcome to Skydio Factory. Thank you. [01:00] We did a whole walking tour of your other facilities. And where are we now? [01:05] So we're in what I believe is the biggest drone factory in the U.S. that's actually at scale production right now. So we're in Hayward, California. [01:14] And this is where we manufacture all of our drone products and docks behind us. [01:19] You can see a road docks that are getting built. [01:21] So demand for this product has really been insane, and we're doing everything we can [01:26] to meet the demand and scale these things. And then just on the other side of the parking lot, we're building the drones.

[01:31] The scale... [01:32] has reached a point where you need any [01:34] A little extra funding. So can you talk about your recent funding announcement? [01:38] Yeah, so we're very excited to be announcing our Series F. This was a $110 million fundraise, $4.4 billion post-money valuation led by insider investors. [01:48] And I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing [01:51] is how small it is. [01:53] We're in the very rare and hard earned position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. And it's a testament, I think, to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products. [02:04] having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling [02:11] and even make more and more aggressive [02:13] bets in building new products like R10, Indoor Drone, F10, Fixed Wing Drone, and all the surrounding software. [02:20] The number one constraint we're facing right now is building more drones faster. The demand for these products [02:26] has really just exploded over the last couple of years. We, a couple weeks ago, announced a $50 million, $3,000-year-old order [02:33] from the U.S. Army. [02:35] that size of contract is actually not that much of an outlier for us these days. So [02:40] It's a good problem to have. [02:41] But, you know, we will be tripling production over the course of this year. We'll be accelerating production. [02:46] the path to market for the new programs that we're working on. [02:49] And then we're also using it to really make sure that we have [02:52] category-defining end-to-end solutions for all of the industries that we serve. One of the frameworks that we have [02:58] is our products and software should adapt themselves to the industry, not the other way around.

[03:02] And so for energy utilities, we want to be able to work with them in a way where their asset locations, their inspection frequencies... [03:08] All the things that they care about just naturally interact with our system in an automated way. [03:12] such that this just becomes a seamless way for them to capture [03:15] the data that they care about. [03:17] What is the scale of the business today and where do all the customers sit? I know you have thousands of customers. [03:22] Yeah. [03:23] So we're right around 4,000 customers. These are enterprise government agencies, [03:28] that are using the product. So this is [03:30] every branch of the Department of War [03:33] number of allies around the world, [03:35] 1,200 public safety agencies across the country, almost every state department of transportation, a number of companies that are doing physical site security for corporate campuses. So the customer base is the [03:47] critical industries that our civilization depends on, [03:50] But we're really still just scratching the surface. You know, our penetration in law enforcement [03:55] is still, I think, less than 1% against the opportunity to respond to every 911 call. [04:01] in the country. So there's still a ton of work [04:03] to be done, but it's already, you know, thousands of drones a month, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. [04:09] We're at a very exciting moment. [04:10] So we started the company in 2014. [04:13] This was really at the dawn of people thinking about drones mostly in a consumer context. [04:17] The big bet that we made was drones can be useful for a lot of people in a lot of different ways. [04:23] and making them smart enough to fly themselves is just going to be a foundational layer. Like having an expert pilot there flying the drone is great if you have one. [04:30] but it's just a fundamental limiter.

[04:32] It's been a journey to get to where we are now. I think the drone industry has been through its own waves of kind of like hype and excitement and troughs of delusion. And there was kind of a first wave of companies when we started where a bunch of capital was invested. And I think we're really the only surviving company. [04:46] that's building drone hardware from that era [04:48] But... [04:49] Now we're at this magical moment where the products and technology have matured to the point where they're really working. [04:55] The industries that we serve have evolved to the point where they see and feel acute need to deploy this kind of tech. [05:01] We find ourselves in a position of really being the only company in the world, certainly the only company outside of China that's capable of delivering these things reliably. [05:08] at scale, so it's just a super [05:09] exciting moment [05:11] And the thing that we've just been about since the very beginning is the substance of building technology that actually can make these visions [05:19] Come to life. [05:21] What's the most difficult part? [05:23] constant theme is achieving high quality and high reliability at increasing levels of scale. [05:28] It's very easy... [05:30] to make a demo. Like, [05:32] Getting a drone to take off and fly around manually is like 0.1% of the way there. [05:37] What's really hard is getting it to have all the capability that you need to do an autonomous mission. [05:44] and then making it that work. [05:46] 90% of the time, 99% of the time, 99.9% of the time, like chasing those nines of reliability. [05:52] And I think you've seen this play out in other spaces as well, like self-driving cars. [05:56] Google could demo [05:57] a self-driving Waymo, [05:59] like 15 years ago [06:01] But it's taken them 15 years to make that reliable to the point where you can actually put a person in it and trust it to just

[06:07] do the job. And it's a very similar story [06:09] with drones. And the compounding factor for us is that it's high stakes. People are depending on these in life or death situations. And so it's that combination [06:17] of cutting edge AI and robotics meets hard industries with high stakes. [06:22] that's like the crucible [06:24] out of which Skydio is forged. 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 bail 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 is designed to help you spend smarter and move faster. [06:54] 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. With same day and even same hour liquidity, access your funds anytime. Companies like Scale AI, DoorDash, Service Titan, HIMSS, Anthropic, Flexport, Robinhood, and Plaid trust and use Brex. [07:24] That's B-R-E-X dot com slash sorcery.

[07:54] I think there are certainly some misconceptions around drones and applications. So could you just share more about what you focus on at Skydio and how it differentiates between this boom in defense? [08:16] So drones are like, it's a very general purpose technology. I mean, it's like computers, right? Computers show up. [08:22] all over the place for all different kinds of things. [08:24] We are super focused on [08:27] flying sensor platforms. [08:29] and [08:30] our biggest, fastest growing businesses are in the civilian sector. They're not in defense. We work with US military, we're super proud of that work. Our products are doing amazing things there. And that business is great. [08:40] and growing [08:42] But the thing that I think is much less seen and appreciated... [08:45] is [08:46] this kind of [08:46] critical infrastructure you were. You know, an energy utility, [08:50] just doing persistent inspection with drones and proactively finding issues that [08:54] where they can spot a defect in one of their conductors and fix it before it blows up and causes an outage, or in the worst case, causes a fire. [09:03] The alternative is having a person climb that pole [09:05] or [09:06] flying a manned helicopter down there, which is very dangerous and expensive. [09:10] And so it's awesome work to get to be a part of. And part of the fun for me is just getting in there and learning about these industries. And the people... [09:17] that do this work on a daily basis are special. The one that I think is going to get more and more visible is law enforcement and public safety. Having drones respond to 911 calls flying out of docks. That's happening. Skydier drones are in most major cities responding to 911 calls today.

[09:31] at sort of small scale, like maybe part of the city [09:34] some fraction of the instance that they're dealing with. [09:36] I think a default expectation in five years is if there's an emergency, you call 911, a drone shows up in a few seconds, and that's going to be [09:43] everywhere in the US, hopefully everywhere, [09:45] in the world, and that's going to change the way policing works. It's going to get better outcomes, you're going to have fewer officer involved shootings, [09:51] faster response times. And I think you can also do that while protecting privacy and transparency. Like these things are essentially flying body cameras. So they document exactly what's happening. They document what the suspect is doing. They document what the officers are doing. [10:04] And our police agencies that we work with are leaning into that. [10:07] as kind of another tool for transparency for the communities that they serve. [10:11] Just recently in Santa Fe, I think this was like last week, there was an anonymous call for somebody that that. [10:18] was in a crisis state [10:20] in a park. [10:21] That's all the information they had. They didn't have a precise location. This was a, like, giant multiple acre, I think probably multiple square mile park. [10:28] They launched the drone, they got there in a few minutes, and from the air they can just very quickly survey the whole thing. [10:34] They found a tent. [10:35] They guided the officers into the tent. [10:37] There was a person in there who had overdosed. [10:39] and they performed CPR and saved this guy's life. And the officer on the ground [10:44] deserves all the credit. [10:45] But... [10:46] that's an instance where the drone was fundamental in changing an outcome. [10:49] There's also situations, there was one in San Francisco where there was a caller reported somebody was on a rooftop with a rifle. [10:56] The drone got there first and saw it was a broomstick, not a rifle. Oh my gosh. [11:00] The chances of a tragic accident go from non-trivial to zero.

[11:04] So this stuff is just happening all the time now. Have you seen it reduce crime? I mean, the stats are crazy. Like, San Francisco, I think, has seen a 42% reduction in auto theft. [11:15] since they launched their drone program. [11:17] I think the strongest product endorsement we've ever gotten was from a podcast from a guy that [11:21] kind of came from [11:23] A. [11:24] criminal background, basically saying that, like, crime in San Francisco is over because you're just going to get caught. Like, [11:30] They don't stand a chance. [11:31] against the tech, like the drone shows up [11:33] It follows you. It'll find you. [11:35] and it's a massive... [11:38] Deterrent. [11:39] The other end of the spectrum is responding to calls and then never having a Senate officer on the ground. [11:44] sort of double-ended. Like, a lot of the impact is, like, the highest stakes, life and death scenarios. But the other end is, like, [11:50] caller reported that somebody's parked where they shouldn't be. And it could be an hour of police officers assigned to drive out there, see what's happening. [11:55] You send the drone, you can see it in three minutes. [11:58] And in many cases, you don't need to send an officer [12:01] and that lets the cops spend time on the really high impact stuff. [12:06] I think across our customer base, when people are sending their own, they're getting to the calls roughly like 70, 80% of the time they get there first. [12:13] So you're saving seconds where you're getting critical information. So we did the math on this. I think 16 million Americans now live within two miles of one of our docking stations for first response. [12:23] about 5% of the country, which is great. [12:25] but it's still small compared to what it will be in a few years. You have a partnership with Armada [12:32] and they're all about computing on the edge.

[12:34] How do you work with Armada to save lives in these areas that are a little bit more remote? [12:39] A lot of our customers operate in very austere environments. We work with departments of transportation that are dealing with construction sites. [12:46] that are kind of the definition of the middle of nowhere. [12:49] And so one of the things that's been really cool, you know, seeing with our customers, we're doing this in partnership with Armada. [12:54] is the creation of these basically completely off-grid setups where you can have [12:59] a solar panel, a battery, [13:01] a Starlink, [13:02] and then edge compute [13:04] sitting next to the dock. And it's crazy. You get all those things there. As long as you have an internet connection from anywhere in the world, you can get in there and fly a drone and see what's happening. [13:15] So this is being used for like storm response. [13:17] in Alaska with Alaska Department of Transportation. It's certainly relevant for the Department of War. [13:23] in austere environments where connectivity is challenged. [13:27] One of our best partnerships is in public safety with Axon. [13:30] So Axon started life making casers, then they made body cameras. [13:34] And now they have a really incredible array of public safety technology [13:38] that solves all kinds of really important problems for law enforcement. [13:42] agencies. And we've got an awesome partnership with them where our [13:45] We sort of think of ourselves as building the ultimate drone spoke [13:48] that plugs into the hub that agencies are already using. And Axon is the hub that we see [13:54] out there. [13:55] Most often. [13:56] So, you know, the drone can [13:58] fly to the location of a body camera. So an officer can just push a button on their body camera. If they're in trouble, they'll summon a drone to get there. And then after it lands, it'll upload the footage

[14:06] to Axon's evidence.com product, which stores all the body camera footage. So the drone footage sits [14:11] right alongside the body camera footage. [14:14] There's a complete chain of custody control, so it can be used in court. [14:17] And it just... [14:18] makes their lives easier. [14:20] Could you share how the product has expanded over time and their different use cases? [14:25] So for the first 10 years of the company, we were [14:28] Basically solely focused, I'm trying to build a really good medium-sized quadcopter. [14:33] which is the most versatile kind of workhorse drone. [14:35] And then for the last six, seven years, [14:38] focused on doing that in the context of a dock, so it can fly remotely and autonomously. So we've been very narrow [14:43] for most of the life of the company. [14:45] But we're now at a point where [14:47] That product is really working at scale, X10 and Doc for X10. [14:51] And the core technology that sits behind it has gotten very mature. All the hardware, the cameras, the compute... [14:57] the sensors, all the low-level firmware to run these things, then the core autonomy system [15:02] that has at this point been exposed and built on, [15:05] hundreds of thousands, millions of flights, [15:07] and all the little learnings that go into that. So now we're in a position to use that core technology [15:12] to apply it to different form factors and use cases. And that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of [15:18] dangerous work happens indoors. [15:19] It's with a fixed wing drone that can cover much longer ranges. [15:22] comes into play. [15:23] And it's a very exciting, fun time to basically like take these mature technology building blocks and be able to pretty quickly assemble them into a fundamentally new capability. [15:32] And then we're also in the great position that our customers are asking us for these things. Like, you know, we have customers banging down the door.

[15:37] asking us to build an indoor drone, asking us to build something that can fly faster and [15:40] and cover more range. And so we're very excited to be delivering, we call it like the family of flying robots, like these [15:46] He's family of systems that all speak the same language. You can control them all through the same interfaces. [15:51] They all nicely interoperate. [15:53] but they all are optimized for specific tasks. Quick note before we keep going. I've been investing on public for a while now, and it's a really solid platform that combines stocks, bonds, options, and crypto with incredible AI tools that let you do things like build a completely custom investable index from a prompt. Right now, public will give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your portfolio. Check it out at public.com slash sorcery public investing for those who take it seriously paid for by public investing. Full disclosures in the description. [16:23] VCX by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View the portfolio at GetVCX.com. That's GetVCX.com. Founders ship faster on deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. [16:53] C-E-R-Y. [16:54] Enterprise AI runs on Merge, the AI infra platform for integrations, agent tooling, and model orchestration, so your teams ship product, not plumbing. [17:03] Mistral, Dropbox, and Drada already trust merge in production.

[17:07] start building at merge.dev. [17:10] Your biggest competitor is China. So could you talk about how that's evolved with DJI, and what is that like, honestly? [17:17] Yeah, so we have the great joy, and we've had it for the last 12 years, of being the U.S. underdog against the best of Chinese industry, early state-sponsored Chinese industry, [17:27] It's great. [17:28] You know, I think competition is generally great. It pushes us to be better. [17:31] In the case of DJI, we have some interesting history. So we actually met them in 2014. So we were a seed stage company. We had just basically gotten started and they found out about us and basically pretty quickly became interested in acquiring DJI. [17:46] The company? [17:47] And [17:48] Through that process, we met their leadership. We visited China, Shenzhen. [17:53] ultimately decided not to do it, [17:55] The main reason we decided not to do it [17:57] was because we felt like [17:59] they didn't really understand the importance of autonomy and how much that was going to change, who could use drones and how they could use them. [18:04] We felt like it was really important. [18:06] And, you know, we believed in our ability to execute against it. [18:09] So our strategy has not been to try to kind of like copy what the Chinese drone companies are doing. I mean, DJI is incredibly impressive from a technology standpoint, especially on the hardware side. [18:20] But we've really focused on building these end-to-end solutions [18:25] that use [18:26] autonomy and flying robots to solve problems [18:29] that customers couldn't get any other way. And I think that's what's enabled us to survive and now really succeed in scale. [18:36] And we don't necessarily have like,

[18:39] the best hardware spec in every single dimension, although we continue to get better and close gaps where we have them. [18:44] But increasingly, we hear from our customers that we just have a better solution. Like, if you want to respond to 911 calls and fight crime in your city... [18:51] we can deliver an end-to-end thing that enables you to do that. [18:53] in a way that you can't get if you just buy a piece of hardware, even if the hardware is great. [18:58] coming from China, [19:00] Now, the other thing that's happened is as drones have become more important [19:03] for all these critical industries, it's become clear that depending on China is a pretty bad idea. [19:07] and [19:08] There's been a lot of policy and [19:11] regulations at the federal level and some state and local stuff. [19:14] that has restricted Chinese drones in some of these industries. Obviously, the U.S. military is not buying Chinese drones, but that has now trickled down [19:21] I think part of the need and part of the opportunity and frankly a big part of the responsibility that [19:25] that we feel is to be the US company that like that meets the need and exists in all these industries and and reduces and ideally over the long term like breaks our dependence on China. Have you had any supply chain risks? [19:36] Originally, like if you roll back 12 years, basically all drones and all drone components were made in China. [19:42] We made a very contrarian bet in 2014 when we started on U.S. manufacturing. Honestly, we did it at the time for practical reasons. Like, these are aerospace devices— [19:50] manufacturing them ourselves in-house close to home [19:53] was the way that we found we could build the best products the fastest. But it's become a critical strategic thing for us over the years [19:59] We did a lot of work to reduce our dependence on China as it became clear that these, you know, how high the national security stakes were. We were almost completely out, but not completely. A year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government.

[20:11] And it was a pretty aggressive action. They announced the sanctions and then they showed up. [20:15] at the [20:16] the suppliers that we still had in China shut them down, stop them from doing business with us. [20:21] really tried to kill us. [20:23] So that was a fun adventure for our supply chain team. They've done incredible work, and we've been able to maintain supply. Yeah. [20:30] And I think the good news piece of this is that we now have by far the most secure drone supply chain [20:36] in the world, independent from China, [20:38] that's operating at increasing levels of scale, and it's not easy [20:41] It's hard. You know, we're oftentimes dealing and working with companies... [20:45] that are less mature than their Chinese counterpart suppliers might be. [20:49] But we're very happy to work with them. We're very happy to invest our own time and money. [20:52] in helping them be great and sometimes doing some of the stuff [20:56] I think it's a really important part of the mission at this point. And we're like all in. [21:01] on hardcore U.S. manufacturing. I think that [21:04] My honest assessment is I think we're not yet [21:07] at like [21:08] In the West, we're leading in terms of drone manufacturing. I don't think we're as good at China as drone manufacturing yet. [21:14] But I don't think there's any law of physics that says we can't get there. [21:16] It's just a continual process of turning the crank, incremental improvement. [21:21] more and more investments in the infrastructure and automation and software that animate these things. And I think it's the right time to be doing it. [21:26] America is stepping on the gas with reindustrialization and bringing manufacturing back to the country. [21:33] How do you think this plays out? Like, what is a realistic timeline on this and the adoption? I mean, you know, you've set up facilities. [21:40] Like TerraFab is coming now. And so how does this play out? I mean, it's not as fast as people might like. You know, you can't snap your fingers and just have a complete hardware ecosystem.

[21:51] overnight [21:52] or even in a year, [21:53] But it's not an impossibility. [21:56] It really just... [21:56] is a matter of like getting the flywheel spinning. And it's an ecosystem thing similar to like the software ecosystem that exists in [22:03] Silicon Valley, where you've got great talent, you've got companies that kind of collaborate and work together. [22:08] and you want the same thing from a hardware standpoint, [22:11] I think actually the East Bay where we are, [22:13] near the Bay Area has great potential for this. Like there's some alternate universe... [22:17] where this looks like what Shenzen looks like. [22:20] And I don't think there's anything fundamentally that should stop us from getting there and [22:24] you know, we're all in here. We see more and more companies doing pieces of manufacturing and hardware operations here. [22:30] Drones can't do it all by themselves, but we're hoping to be one of the driving forces. [22:33] that makes it happen. [22:35] How have you [22:36] found the talent [22:38] Well, the talent level is great. Every skill set you need in terms of like physical assembly... [22:43] managing a line, manufacturing, engineering, [22:46] all the different pieces, like, it [22:48] There's not as much of it as we might like, but the talent level... [22:52] is incredibly high. [22:53] Tesla has generated some great alumni. [22:56] And we have a lot of fantastic folks that have come from [22:59] force in the fire of production hell on model three. [23:02] And then we just focus on people that we think have enormous potential, whether or not they have sort of like [23:06] the proven exact right experience, like the thing that we really care about. [23:09] is the potential and the ceiling for what somebody's capable of. And that applies everywhere, whether it's manufacturing, software engineering, sales, marketing, everything. What do you look for in candidates? [23:18] Well, it... [23:19] depends on the role. The fundamental things that I'm looking for

[23:23] When I talk to folks, [23:25] is [23:26] that sort of spark of capability that not necessarily comes from experience, [23:31] But does somebody have like the combination of the fire and passion to do hard things? [23:36] and then the horsepower [23:38] To get it done, [23:39] What do you think your biggest lessons have been as a leader? There's a lot of hype going on. And so, like, how do you discern... [23:47] the fact from the fiction and then just keep a straight level head. [23:52] I think one of the big early lessons for me [23:54] uh, [23:55] was [23:56] the importance of humility as a leader. I think, you know, your job isn't to have all the answers. Your job is just to help the team, the company get to the best answers. [24:04] And there's lots of different ways you can do that. [24:06] in these sort of like hype moments when you're going up the like the hype cycle curve, I think it's really important to just keep people focused and grounded in the substance of what we're doing. [24:15] And, [24:16] The most important thing at the end of the day is having world-leading products and technology that really work the way our customers need them to. [24:22] and then delivering them to our customers and making them [24:26] fully succeed and realize the full potential of what the products and tech can do. [24:29] We just spend a lot of time thinking and talking about that. [24:33] and try to spend as little time as possible [24:36] getting distracted by anything else. [24:38] that might be happening. I mean, one of the, I didn't invent this, but one of the frameworks I think about is like, get rich slowly. [24:43] Like, I think that enduring value and enduring impact [24:46] is built on a lot of patience and a lot of hard work and [24:49] It's easy to lose sight of that, but ultimately, like the signal trumps the noise.

[24:55] It always does. It might take [24:58] Year might take a decade. [24:59] but the real substance is ultimately what matters. Is there anyone that's inspired you along the way or... [25:06] as a mentor. [25:07] I've been fortunate [25:09] to [25:10] get exposure and get to work with a lot of the folks that were key, especially in the comeback period at Apple, like when Steve Jobs came back, [25:18] A lot of the engineering executives and leadership team that was in place there have become investors or... [25:23] advisors or mentors for us. [25:26] I've learned a lot from them. I think one of the things [25:29] that [25:30] who was certainly true at Apple then, [25:33] just [25:34] this insistence on... [25:36] their leaders being [25:39] exceptional engineers themselves. [25:41] And [25:43] I remember a conversation that had a big impression, made a big impression on me. I was like talking to one of [25:47] our advisors, who was a key senior exec at Apple at the time, of like, you know, how do you think about prioritizing sort of like management and leadership skills versus technical ability? [25:56] And he just said, you need both. Like, you can't compromise. The best people are able to do both. And I took that to heart. We've really focused on that of, like... [26:03] finding even senior executives who are capable of getting all the way down into the deep details. [26:08] solving technical problems themselves and then leading the teams with that kind of capability [26:13] in mind. [26:14] If you [26:15] could have any job [26:18] Here. [26:19] What would it be? You can't... [26:21] You can't be CEO. [26:22] Yeah. [26:23] Well, I will say, I think [26:25] My current job is pretty great. It has not always been fun. I mean, there's been moments of like intense stress and challenge.

[26:32] But I wouldn't trade this for anything else in the world. I mean, it's just an incredible experience. You know, if I could do anything at the company other than this, [26:39] I would, you know, I would [26:41] probably go back to my comfort zone and be like a planning and controls autonomy engineer. [26:46] This is the stuff, you know, this is what I did as a researcher. [26:48] in grad school. And I think the problems that we get to work on there are just so fascinating and so interesting and [26:54] In the HVII, the tools that you have at your disposal to build these things are [26:58] are super fun. So, you know, the people on that team will tell you that I like, I'm [27:03] I'm not too far away. Like I live, I live vicariously through their work. [27:06] sometimes, but I would love to just get unbounded time to dive into some of those problems. How has AI helped the business or transformed it? In some ways, it's at the core of the product since we started in 2014. We were, I think, amongst the first, if not [27:21] like the first company in the world, the shipper robotics product that used deep learning as part of the perception stack. Um, [27:27] So in many ways we've been in it from the beginning, [27:30] I think now it's just everywhere, right? Superjuice. It's literally everywhere. Yeah, it's everywhere. Yeah. [27:36] And [27:37] I think it's exciting. I think it's on it. If, you know, if people are being honest, I think it's a little bit intimidating because it's just, it's moving so quickly. And, [27:44] Even the people who are building it can't predict where it's going. So it's a time of max change. [27:50] like from a product perspective, I think [27:53] the course that we're charting is towards [27:57] our drones being like [27:59] flying agentic AI, just like you have an agent that you interact with on your computer, you

[28:05] or in the cloud, this thing is an agent that can move and do work for you in the physical world, and you should interact with it in similar ways. It should have the intelligence and domain expertise [28:14] to be useful to you in that way. [28:16] The way that we write software is obviously fundamentally [28:19] changing. And I think that the big investments that we've made in automation infrastructure, so that we can test our hardware [28:25] in real-time and in automated ways, [28:28] and we have a very rich simulation environment that we built up that enables us to like iterate quickly. Those things are now paying off massively because [28:35] that's like that's a goldmine for AI enabled development because you you know you can test and iterate with [28:42] the real physics that you care about [28:44] in the loop. So you can do a lot of the speed of software with hardware [28:48] involved. So how are you competing with all the other companies out there? There's clearly talent wars, there's companies getting massive funding announcements left and right, like growing really fast. Yeah, so the talent wars are definitely raging. [29:01] It's a great time to be an engineer. I think it's really a great time to be working in [29:06] in this industry [29:07] The things that we have going on here, and this is [29:11] it's true and it's also our pitch are unique. I think there's no other company [29:15] in the world really that has the combination of like true cutting edge sci-fi technology i mean the [29:21] The level of technology that development's happening here, the pace that it's happening is [29:25] unmatched and i think we have unmatched talent density that's enabling that but it's in a real business that's really working [29:31] with customers that depend on this in life-saving critical missions.

[29:36] and [29:36] That combination is unique, and that's really [29:41] the draw for the people that come here and it's not for everybody. [29:45] The work is hard. The stakes are high. [29:47] We're pushing to be the best in the world at what we do. [29:50] But for the people that kind of like love that challenge and love the combination of cutting edge tech with real immediate real world impact. [29:58] I don't think there's any more exciting place in the world than Skydio, and it's never been a more exciting time. [30:04] to work on this stuff, because we are really just scratching the surface. [30:07] I want to talk about performance a bit. So one of [30:11] Sorcery sponsors is Brex and they're all about spending smarter and moving faster. The performance, Purpicar. So on the topic of performance, how are you measuring out [30:19] the next milestones, what metrics are you using to measure success? [30:23] We define our success [30:25] in terms of our customer success. And you have to think on long timescales here and different timescales. [30:30] Like my weekly executive staff meeting starts with our head of customer success. [30:36] giving us a rundown of what's happening in the field with customers, good, bad and ugly. You know, if the customer had a great win, we'll talk about that, but we'll spend a lot more time talking about the things that are struggling, they're not working as well. [30:46] whatever the case may be, whether it's technical or some other issue that we might be able to deal with. [30:50] So everything is kind of downstream from that. I am not big on these like sort of like [30:54] super granular cascading OKRs through the whole organization. [30:58] I'm very big on coming up with like [31:00] targets that we're aiming at. I sort of think of these things as like, you know, we think that this product for this market has enormous opportunity.

[31:07] organizing really small teams around them. You want the team to be as small as it possibly can be and in the AJI you can do [31:12] Pretty amazing things with pretty small teams. [31:14] and then giving that team [31:16] the authority and autonomy [31:18] to operate however is going to be most effective for them. So, you know, our, our teams are setting very granular goals oftentimes of like this, [31:26] week, this day, this hour, here's what we're trying to accomplish. [31:29] But they're doing so kind of under their own authority and autonomy. And then [31:34] The way that we run the business, I spend a lot of time kind of floating around across all these different small teams, all these different projects. [31:39] checking in with them, seeing if I can help them solve problems. [31:42] but really trusting the team and the leader of the team [31:46] to [31:47] to run their own shit. [31:48] What is your hottest take? [31:51] Ha ha ha! [31:52] Thank you. [31:53] I'm excited to see... [31:56] renewed enthusiasm for robotics. [31:59] And I think that AI certainly is a massive sort of [32:04] opening of the aperture of what we can do with robots, [32:06] But [32:08] I think that [32:08] we are going to see... [32:10] a lot of pain and carnage [32:13] on the investments and expectations that are being set [32:17] in this sort of like most recent round of robotics companies because it's just [32:22] The physical world does not work the way the software world [32:25] works. And I've seen it over and over again, [32:28] where [32:29] The playbook, it's just not the same, and it takes longer [32:32] The learning cycles are slower, they're more expensive, [32:35] it's harder to build [32:37] the business because you're solving, you're selling to like real physical industries that are going to have to change the way they do physical work.

[32:43] We're in one of these moments where you can just see [32:46] the bubbly dynamics. [32:48] out there and in the short term it leads to less efficient allocation of resources. In the long term it'll all be fine. [32:54] because the substance... [32:56] will win the day. [32:58] What advice do you have for founders that are trying to start now? [33:02] Well, I think it's simultaneously never been a more exciting time to start a company. I think it's probably also never been like a more... [33:10] hard competitive time. I think especially when you're operating in bubbly times, [33:14] you will naturally get pulled away from the substance and get pulled towards like fundraising milestones and sort of like vanity metrics and press coverage and whatnot. I think [33:22] My number one piece of advice is get really anchored in the customer problem that you're trying to solve and building... [33:29] world-class technology, [33:30] to solve it. [33:31] Amazing. So as we wrap up, [33:34] What are you most looking forward to this year? [33:36] If I had to pick one thing, [33:38] I'm excited to see... [33:40] the impact of our public safety business continue to scale. [33:44] Because we know with 100% certainty now, [33:47] from the agencies that are deploying it that [33:49] It saves lives. It changes the way law enforcement works for the better for everybody, for communities, for law enforcement, even for the suspects. It helps keep them safer. I'm excited to see that 2, 3x over the course of the year and just continue to compound. [34:02] My kind of like 1B behind that [34:05] would be we're now in a position to deliver the same kind of end-to-end solution we do for law enforcement. [34:11] to multiple industries for site security, [34:13] for energy utility inspection, even for battlefield ISR, intelligence surveillance reconnaissance.

[34:20] and we've got awesome teams working on that. [34:23] And, you know, we're doing a lot of this stuff today, but I'm excited to see those efforts really like mature and get to the next level. [34:29] Very exciting. Well, thank you so much. And congratulations on the new round. I appreciate it. Thank you. This has been awesome.