Autonomous work drone company Skyfish, based in Stevensville, Montana, announced June 25 that it raised $20 million in a Series Seed funding round led by Tampa, FL’s Bayshore Capital and SBA Communications director Steven Bernstein based in Boca Raton, FL.
Skyfish specializes in autonomous drones that can inspect and create “engineering grade” 3D models of critical infrastructure such as towers, bridges, powerlines, and wind turbines.
The company partners with Sony to gather high-definition optical data and analyzes the images through a process called photogrammetry. Photogrammetry correlates, triangulates, warps, and stitches the metadata of thousands of photos algorithmically into a precise “digital twin” model. Skyfish allows users to upload their drone data to a web based processing, visualization, and analysis system called Skyportal. Skyfish developed Skyportal to make the entire process from scanning to analysis easy.
“The secret sauce in our technology revolves around transforming photos and meta-data into these amazing 3D models that we house in Skyportal. The user can fly around in the model and measure objects down to a 32nd of an inch. It’s similar to a video game” said Skyfish CEO Dr. Orest Pilskalns.
An engineer doesn’t need a climber to scale a tower, place a tape measure on an object, and take a picture. With Skyfish technology the engineer can simply use her web browser to log into Skyfish’s Skyportal to see the data. In Skyportal, all of the scanned structures are available for analysis. With a few clicks of the mouse the user can view a complete computer-aided drawing (CAD) of the drone scanned infrastructure. If an engineer needs to place a new antenna on an existing tower mount, they can use Skyfish to structurally analyze the mount to see if it’s capable of supporting the antenna. Skyfish interfaces with structural analysis tools such as Risa and Bentley Systems.
The seed funding is allotted to improve drone manufacturing capacity and expand the company’s existing talent pool. In fact, Skyfish is set to double its 30-person workforce in the next year by hiring assemblers, engineers, pilots, and machine vision experts.
