You may have seen the news that 3D Robotics has just announced a $30 million Series B investment, led by some blue-chip VC firms, including Foundry and True (investors in MakerBot and other open source companies such as WordPress/Automattic). You can see Foundry's announcement post here.
This is our second funding round (the Series A was November last year), and each round reflects a new era of the company. Because 3DR started in this community, which I created one weekend six years ago, I wanted to take a moment to talk a little about our evolution as a company and what it means for users, developers and the community as a whole.
Our first phase as a company (2009) was led by my co-founder, Jordi Munoz, and it looked like this:
Jordi hand-soldering original ArduPilot shields
My kids packing up Blimpduino kits at the dining room table
Jordi then built up a proper manufacturing operation, taking it to this by 2012:
At this point 3D Robotics was still selling mostly electronics, essentially bare boards and "bags of parts" kits, much like our role models at Sparkfun and Adafruit. But it was clear that the industry was growing up and was ready to go more mainstream. So on the basis of that and our progress so far, we raised our Series A round in December 2012 and I came onboard as CEO nine months ago.
Our mission over the past nine months has been to professionalize the company and our products, and although that's far from done we've made a lot of progress. On the company side, this meant new websites, ecommerce systems, improvements in customer support (still a work in progress but we've shortened response times and moved to Zendesk to track issues better), and most importantly, the opening of our big new manufacturing facility in Tijuana.
On the community side, we've sponsored the software dev teams, the documentation teams and the community management teams here, on the new ArduPilot.com documentation sites and on the GitHub dev repository. 3DR just sells the "atoms" (the hardware) while this open source community creates and gives away the "bits" (the software), but as a company we've worked hard to support the community in every way we can to encourage a healthy community/company partnership. (We're modeled after WordPress/Automattic in this respect).
We owe a huge debt of gratitude to the hundreds of developers, editors, moderators, beta testers and other volunteers who have created such an extraordinary thing here: the software teams, the documentation teams and everywhere else where the open innovation model has worked so well to serve a community of nearly 44,000 members. Our commitment is to use our funding to help make this community even better, by investing more in the open innovation model. As we have from the start, we'll continue doing what we can to help people here help each other, following the lead of open source models from Linux to Adafruit and our original mentors at Arduino.
On the product side, the last year has seen the development (with ETH) of our next-gen autopilot, Pixhawk, and the consumer-friendly Iris autonomous quadcopter designed for tablet/phone use, and a suite of software that will be announced soon as part of the Iris Consumer Edition.
That brings us to our third phase, which starts now: not just creating drones, but putting them to work. This means finding new applications for aerial robotics by creating entire systems, from the cloud to tablets/phones to communications systems to more sophisticated aircraft systems and payloads. From Agriculture to Hollywood, this is where the real opportunity lies.
I feel we're like the PC industry in 1983. As an industry, we've come close to taking drones from industrial equipment or hobbyist gear (from the mainframes to the Apple II of the late 70s) to the first Macintosh, making them consumer friendly and easy to use. Now that drones are not just for the technically sophisticated anymore, it's time to find out what they can really do, by putting them in the hands of regular people, from GoPro owners to farmers, and see how they use "anywhere, anytime access to the skies" to discover new applications and markets, much as we did with computers after the original IBM PC and the Mac.
In short, this is just the beginning. I couldn't be more thrilled to embark on our next chapter.
Comments
@Brent It was nice to see someone read my comment regarding Crowdfunding vs. VC funding, it's a shame Chris wasn't compelled to respond to that. I just thought it was a nice thought that if a business enterprise purports to be community-centric that they give that community the opportunity to invest rather than some outside source. But I'm probably a bit naive and not a venture capital high tech business expert.
On the subject of 3DR's customer service. They sure do have a lot of problems with technology for a "technology" based company, basic things like getting their help desk email to work, getting correct postage to work on their website, fulfilling orders that appear to be in stock in a reasonable time frame. But I do have to say that when it's brought to Chris' attention, it does get action. When I posted something on another thread and complained about my experience, I got a prompt response and my problems were taken care of. So for that I say 3DR is trying to do what's right.
On another note. I'm new to all this drone stuff. My first multirotor copters that I bought came equipped with DJI Naza controllers. When I was researching and stopped in a local shop in So. Cal., I talked to some people about DJI and 3DR. I really liked the concept of 3DR, both from the business side and from the technology they offered. I made a decision that for what I wanted to do, 3DR sounded like the way to go. When I talked to some people who used UAVs for professional aerial photography platforms, the response always seemed to be that 3DR was not worth wasting time on, if you really want to get a system that you can depend on for professional level work, go with DJI. Being the bullheaded and cheap guy that I am, I thought 3DR products can't be that bad and they appeared to have such incredible value! So after actually flying a couple of DJI systems (and they were so easy to setup and fly), I bought a 3DR system and all I can say is that I've had nothing but problems. Do I regret that choice and am I going to switch back to some other system, NO, because I do believe in what Chris and his company say they are trying to do. I've spent countless hours just trying to get the hexacopter that 3DR built and set up to fly right. I had the DJI copters flying and filming with no experience at all, but with the 3DR hardware it's been one thing after another. But 3DR always seemed to try and help as long as I was patient. Their help department answered my calls and tried to help even thought ultimately they couldn't figure out a solution for the problem I had. Then when I had another problem with an order that I received and getting a response from support to my emails, Chris stepped in and I got everything taken care of. So while it might seem like I'm complaining and whining and not a 3DR fanboy, I'm all in! It sure seems to me like for what I want to do (aerial mapping data collection) it's got everything else beat hands down (once you go through the learning curve). So I'm sticking with it and hope that the business keeps going in the right direction, I guess that's one of the reasons I asked about other types of community funding, because I'd like to participate.
Bruce: We're on the Ning platform and that's being upgraded to Ning 3.0 around the end of the year. Being more mobile friendly is the mission of Ning 3.0, but we'll evaluate it before we move to ensure that it suits this community's needs.
Bruce:
Tapatalk is on the todo-list, at least for the new support-forum at ardupilot.com.
I really hope there's an upgrade to the diydrones community websites in your future plans. A modern, standard, easy to use, easy to follow, compatible-with-mobile-devices forum would be really great. I read 95% of my forum subscriptions on mobile devices, usually using Tapatalk. I kind of dread going to the diydrones website now because the organization is so muddled and it's difficult to see what's new since my last visit.
I think a better forum system would improve the whole experience a lot.
Brent: I actually agree with you in principle, and our plans to start an independent DroneCode Consortium (something we hope to launch before the end of the year) is a step in that direction. Membership would be composed of the companies that give back the most to this community, in labor, code or cash. As for whether DIYD would become part of that or not is something we haven't talked about, but it's not impossible to imagine someday.
Shyam: I presume you got this RC receiver? That's an 8-channel PPM receiver. I think you're confusing the four PWM outputs, which are not used, with the single 8-channel PPM output.
They approached us and convinced us that they shared our values. Look at the portfolios of OATV, True and Foundry and you'll see lots of community-centric open source companies. We were impressed.
Needless to say, we found the right investors who share our community focus and have a track record of supporting open source.
Chris, since you're actively monitoring here, can you comment on your statements in the past about VC investment and community priority?
Chris Anderson
Travis: Yes, 3D Robotics (the commercial arm of DIY Drones) has not taken any external funding. By maintaining full control we're able ensure that our top priority is serving the community, not some investor.
Mar 2, 2012
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