Skylark Drones raises $3 million led by InfoEdge Ventures, IAN Fund

Bengaluru: Skylark Drones, a drone platform company, on Monday said it has raised $3 million in a pre-series A funding round to strengthen its product offerings and fuel international expansion.

The funding round was co-led by InfoEdge Ventures and IAN Fund with participation from AdvantEdge Founders, Fowler Westrup, Redstart Labs, IKP and Vimson group.

This follows the company’s previous seed funding round in 2018.

Skylark Drones, which has offices in US and India, aims to elevate worksite productivity and safety by providing geospatial intelligence to different enterprises in sectors such as mining, solar power, real estate, agriculture and inspection. It provides its clients with the ability to use AI powered technology products such as Spectra and Drone Mission Ops.

"Our vision is to unlock the economic potential of aerial intelligence. We thank the lead investors of this round and believe the participation of Fowler Westrup, a leading agriculture solutions company, and Vimson Group mining conglomerate will help further strengthen the sector focussed solutions we offer our customers,” said Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy, CEO and co-founder of Skylark Drones.

The six-year-old startup will use the new funding to enhance the actionable insights from drone data that it provides, in order to aid and simplify business decisions and strategy for its clients. The investment will also be used to spur international product expansion and development of its drone data analytics products.

Amit Behl, partner, Info Edge Venture Fund said, “Aerial intelligence is a theme that has immense potential as it provides significant cost, time and accuracy benefits for large infrastructure companies which face frequent cost and time overruns. Skylark has built an indigenous platform that facilitates quick mobilization of independent drone pilots, enabling them to run drone missions to gather aerial images of large worksites. Skylark’s computer vision software analyses this aerial imagery to offer industry specific insights for its mining, solar and construction clients. Being amongst a limited set of players who have a full-stack offering, we believe that the opportunity for the company is global.”

With the rising adoption of advanced technologies such as AI and ML, Skylark Drones’ solutions can unlock potential while increasing productivity and ensuring safety of work-sites, said Rajnish Kapur, managing partner at IAN Fund. "What impressed us most was a strong and unique business model – one that is easily scalable in India and beyond. We are delighted to make this contribution and hope the company marks its presence globally."

Drones are becoming the norm for remote worksite monitoring & inspections, and there has been rapid adoption from marquee enterprises like Tata Steel, Ultratech Cement, Softbank Energy over the past few years, said Mrinal Pai, co-founder of Skylark Drones. "We look forward to serving more enterprises in the next leg of our growth story,” Pai added.

Kunal Khattar, managing partner of AdvantEdge Founders said, “The Skylark team led by Mughilan and Mrinal is one of the best teams out there with global aspirations to build deep tech solutions and services for full stack array of drone applications. We have been impressed by the technology stack built by the team and strong execution demonstrated while working with the country’s top conglomerates. We are delighted to participate in this round to partner with them to build in India for the world.”