Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
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Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
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Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#2I know the article says Airware attempted to go into hardware, but did its operating system (ostensibly its main product) have users?
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#3I know the article says Airware attempted to go into hardware, but did its operating system (ostensibly its main product) have users?
https://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/airware/
A few customers listed here: Delta Drone, Drone America.
Sounds like the market didn't want or need a $2500/yr/drone software package for automating flights/data retrieval/storage. And there's simply no competing at the hardware level with DJI, even with $118M in funding.
"Across all prices in North America, DJI represented 50 percent of the market, Snow says. The price range where DJI is not dominant is drones under $500, which are mostly toys, and where there are hundreds of companies competing." [1]
There's money to be made in industrial (non-warfare) drones - but not as much as everyone thinks, and competition is really tough.
[1] https://www.recode.net/2017/4/14/14690576/drone-market-share...
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#4I'm not really surprised by this. At a drone conference in 2016, I first saw presentations from them among many other interesting technology vendors. They had a "vision" that they carefully presented on stage of what they would do, but everyone else at the show was either demoing technology or taking orders. Airware had a "call us for pricing" kind of attitude.
Meanwhile, its been a year since Verizon acquired Skyward - which was a force in the drone industry pushing for better flight management tools, better collaboration with ATC, and an affordable product for small-time commercial operators that got most of their money as contractors/service providers.
At the enterprise level, Drones just didn't solve a lot of problems. At the small farmer, construction contractor, gravel pit, etc, drones solved a lot of problems, but drones were the anti-scale solution. They Reduced the work so drastically, and improved the result so much that there was no need to scale up software licenses. In many cases, it just did the work better, in a 10th of the time, at a much lower cost. But, there was not a giant amount of work in the queue for those companies. Just a steady flow of the same jobs that used to take longer.
Now, beyond visual line of sight (BVLS) flights might change that for the enterprise eventually, Power lines, rails, pipelines, and roads are all good candidates for remote, automated drone inspection. But, I suspect that it will be either DJI hardware, Custom Hardware, and some amount of custom software that really integrates drones into the enterprise process. Flight planning is only part of the picture. Maybe Airware had it all, but, if so, they were too early - they couldn't outlast the slow (and rational) pace of aviation regulatory change.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#5Out of curiosity, how much drawdown do the VCs typically deal with during these liquidations?
They get whatever's left based on their liquidation preference and preferred stockholder preference, leaving nothing for common stock holders including the founders themselves.
Whats a typical drawdown look like?
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#6In cases like this, I rarely see the code being shared open source. Is it because it’s worthless, or because investors sell it to recuperate some costs?
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#7so it seems like Drones is one of the first big nascent industries, SV utterly lost to China b/c of their dominance of manufacturing?
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#8In cases like this, I rarely see the code being shared open source. Is it because it’s worthless, or because investors sell it to recuperate some costs?
It’s because 1) nobody gives a shit and 2) it would need legal review to make sure that it wouldn’t expose the defunct company to further lawsuits over copyright or patent infringement. That’s expensive and not worth it for a dead company
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#9so it seems like Drones is one of the first big nascent industries, SV utterly lost to China b/c of their dominance of manufacturing?
SV didn't lose to China; everyone lost to DJI.
Their competence was staggering (I think they kind of slowed down lately being that they're so far out from everyone; throttling their innovation a bit).
If DJI represents the future of Chinese corporations[0], many people on the other side of the ocean should be very wary.
[0] edited from "products". In fact what's so impressive with DJI is not just the products themselves, but also the design, marketing and branding, which is kind of an Apple/GoPro hybrid. They are not just creating immense value - they are packaging it the right way.
Re: Airware is shutting down after raising $118M
#10Out of curiosity, how much drawdown do the VCs typically deal with during these liquidations? They get whatever's left based on their liquidation preference and preferred stockholder preference, leaving nothing for common stock holders including the founders themselves. Whats a typical drawdown look like?
i guess it depends on if they have anything to sell...i bet most software startups would have a pretty significant drawdown unless they've made some unique ip that's worth something.