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

“Yeah, so we're very excited to be announcing our Series F. This was $110 million fundraise, $4.4 billion post-money valuation led by insider investors. And I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder position amongst robotics and AI companies of actually having rapidly declining capital needs. It's a testament to the strength of the core business, the demand for these products, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling.”

“I really think the most significant fact in this whole thing is how small it is. We're in the very rare and harder 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, having a really elite team that's capable of operating extremely efficiently, that we actually don't need that money to keep scaling and even make more and more aggressive bets in building new products.”

“The number one constraint we're facing right now is building more drones faster. The demand for these products has really just exploded over the last couple of years. We a couple of weeks ago announced a $50 million, 3,000 drone order from the US Army. That size of contract is actually not that much of an outlier for us these days. So it's a good problem to have, but we will be tripling production over the course of this year.”

“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 everywhere in the US, hopefully everywhere 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, faster response times. And I think you can also do that while protecting privacy and transparency. Like these things are essentially flying body cameras.”

“A year and a half ago, we had the great honor of being sanctioned by the Chinese government. And it was a pretty aggressive action. They announced the sanctions, and then they showed up at the suppliers that we still had in China, shut them down, stop them from doing business with us, really tried to kill us. So that was a fun adventure for our supply chain team. They've done incredible work, and we've been able to maintain supply. And I think the good news piece of this is that we now have by far the most secure drone supply chain in the world, independent from China.”

“Now we're in a position to use that core technology to apply it to different form factors and use cases. And that's where the indoor drone comes into place, because a lot of dangerous work happens indoors. It's where the fixed wing drone that can cover much longer ranges comes into play. And it's a very exciting, fun time to basically take these mature technology building blocks to be able to pretty quickly assemble them into a fundamentally new capability.”

“From a product perspective, I think the course that we're charting is towards our drones being like flying agentic AI, just like you have an agent that you interact with on your computer or in the cloud, this thing is an agent that can move and do more for you in the physical world and you should interact with it in similar ways. Like it should have the intelligence and domain expertise to be useful to you in that way.”

“I think one of the things that was certainly true at Apple then is just this insistence on their leaders being exceptional engineers themselves. I remember a conversation that made a big impression on me. I was talking to one of our advisors who was a key senior executive at Apple at the time of like, how do you think about prioritizing sort of like management and leadership skills versus technical ability? And he just said, you need both. Like, you can't compromise. The best people are able to do both.”