Our Investment in Airspace Link
Flight has always fascinated me. As a child, I spent my time building model airplanes and firing off bottle rockets, and as an adult, I’ve always been drawn to companies building products for the sky.
Indicator Ventures has looked at various opportunities in the UAV space (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, e.g. drones) over the years, but timing, product and/or teams were never quite right — until now.
With cheaper drone hardware, faster network connectivity and overwhelming excitement from recreational, governmental and commercial stakeholders, this emerging industry is prime for investment. Furthermore, imminent policy changes on both the federal and state levels including the FAA’s Remote ID rule are clear indicators to us of how real this opportunity is.
I’m thrilled to announce our recent investment in Airspace Link, which partners with communities to empower safer drone airspace planning. The company’s powerful FAA-certified SaaS platform sits between pilots, the FAA, and state and local governments to determine where drones can fly, while offering near real-time approvals and alerts from all the key stakeholders. Airspace Link also helps the over 160K registered US drone operators abide by the 200+ different required local drone ordinances.
Our investment follows the company’s significant approval from the FAA for low-altitude authorization and notification capabilities (LAANC) and a strategic partnership with Esri, enabling them to build much-needed drone infrastructure by leveraging ground-based data to create the ‘highways in the skies.’
The Airspace Link team is perfectly suited to undertake this challenge given their deep network in the drone industry, their unique backgrounds in infrastructure management and geospatial government solutions, and their superpower of building products for states and local governments.
We are lucky to be working with Michael, Danny, Ana and the rest of the Airspace Link team, and I look forward to my visits to their headquarters in Detroit, an exciting and emerging technology ecosystem!
To read more about Airspace Link and their recent round of funding, click here.
