Autonomous drone startup Exyn raises $35M for mapping GPS-denied environments

AI

Exyn Technologies, the developer of a robotic autonomy platform for multiple types of drones capable of navigating complex, hazardous and GPS-denied environments, said Friday it raised $35 million in early-stage funding to expand its operations.

The Series B funding round was led by Reliance Industries, a large conglomerate headquartered in Mumbai, India, with businesses across energy, petrochemicals, natural gas, telecommunications, telecommunications, mass media and retail.

Exyn’s artificial intelligence-enabled robotic autonomy has permitted the company to commercialize the highest level of aerial drone autonomy known as Autonomy Level 4. This allows drones to navigate within tight quarters without the need for line-of-sight operation, a prior map with waypoints or wireless communication — including global positioning, which would not work underground or inside a building.

As a result, a flying drone can be easily released into a complex or hazardous environment and allowed to do its own scans with a set of parameters, run a task using its own onboard AI, and return to its home base. That gives users a broad amount of flexibility for operating drones in environments such as caves, as well as for mining purposes, where drones would have been difficult to use before.

Full drone autonomy also allows human operators to remain safely out of the way of potentially dangerous areas, letting drones peek into nooks and crannies, fly over unstable structures, or point cameras into crevasses that cannot be easily seen without putting workers in harm’s way. As a result, the use of AI can greatly reduce worker injury while providing much-needed extra information about work sites.

“With our mission of decreasing the amount of injuries and fatalities in ‘physical’ industries gathering data in dangerous environments, having this investment will accelerate Exyn’s impact and growth,” commented Nader Elm, chief executive of Exyn Technologies. “With this new capital, we will further expand our worldwide footprint to dramatically improve safety for those working in dangerous environments around the world and keeping them out of harm’s way.”

The company’s drones include 4K cameras and built-in lighting in order to deliver high-resolution video so that operators can get high-quality views of what could be potentially dangerous environments. They are also outfitted with gimbal-mounted laser imaging, detection and ranging, or LiDAR, sensors capable of creating high-accuracy 3D imaging scans of complex scenes and for doing close navigation of similar environments and avoiding obstacles in dynamic situations in real time.

Exyn has already established itself as a front-runner for drones in the mining industry and is expanding into construction, warehouses and government use cases including search and rescue, and reconnaissance.

“The application of our fully autonomous robots is expansive and with this investment and partnership we look forward to transforming dangerous, physical data collection into a safer and more efficient workflow that can unlock further operational effectiveness and efficiency for our customers,” Elm said.

The new funds will be used to launch operations in the Indian market and expand further globally into Latin America, Australia and Africa in order to bring exposure to its drone mapping platform.

Image: Exyn