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

**Adam Bry** (0:00)
There's no other company in the world that has the combination of true cutting edge sci-fi technology. In a real business, that's really working in life-saving critical missions. And so it's that combination of cutting edge AI and robotics meets hard industries with high stakes. That's like the crucible out of which Skydio is forged.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:19)
How has AI transformed the business?

**Adam Bry** (0:21)
From a product perspective, the course that we're charting is towards flying agentic AI that can have the intelligence and domain expertise. 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.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:38)
What is your hottest take?

**Adam Bry** (0:40)
I think we're at this magical moment where you can have...

**Molly O'Shea** (0:54)
Adam, welcome to Sourcery.

**Adam Bry** (0:56)
Great to be here, although really welcome to Skydio Factory. Thank you.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:59)
I mean, we did a whole walking tour of your other facilities, and where are we now?

**Adam Bry** (1:06)
So we're in what I believe is the biggest drone factory in the US that's actually at scale production right now. So we're in Hayward, California, and this is where we manufacture all of our drone products and docks. Behind us, you can see a road docks that are getting built.
So demand for this product has really been insane, and we're doing everything we can to meet the demand and scale these things. And then just on the other side of the parking lot, we're building the drones.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:31)
The scale has reached a point where you need a little extra funding. So can you talk about your recent funding announcement?

**Adam Bry** (1:38)
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. 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 like R10, the Indoor Drone, F10, Fixed Wing Drone, and all the surrounding software. 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, we'll be accelerating the path to market for the new programs that we're working on. And then we're also using it to really make sure that we have category defining end-to-end solutions for all of the industries that we serve. One of the frameworks that we have is our products and software should adapt themselves to the industry, not the other way around.
And so for energy utilities, we want to be able to work with them in a way where their asset locations, their inspection frequencies, all the things that they care about just naturally interact with our system in an automated way such that this just becomes a seamless way for them to capture the data that they care about.

**Molly O'Shea** (3:17)
What is the scale of the business today and where do all the customers sit? I know you have thousands of customers.

**Adam Bry** (3:22)
Yeah.
So we're right around 4,000 customers. These are enterprise government agencies that are using the products. So this is every branch of the Department of War, number of allies around the world, 1,200 public safety agencies across the country, almost every state Department of Transportation, a number of companies that are doing physical site security for corporate campuses. So the customer base is the critical industries that our civilization depends on. But we're really still just scratching the surface.
Our penetration in law enforcement is still, I think, less than 1% against the opportunity to respond to every 911 call in the country. So there's still a ton of work to be done, but it's already thousands of drones a month, hundreds of millions of dollars a year in revenue. We're at a very exciting moment. So we started the company in 2014