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
And fo rhte folks who seem upset by all this, they do not really seem to be the folks contributing much if anything. If terribly unhappy, then it is easy to not do business with 3DR and go elsewhere.
I missed htis while traveling. Congrats on the capital infusion. I look forward to all sorts of good things from you guys.
Yes, this rumor has been stated as truth for quite some time. I don't know who started it, but I know where it's been perpetuated. Actually, I believed this to be a true fact myself. It's been mentioned here before, and never refuted, so I assumed that meant it was true.
Not that it would be a problem if it *were* true, but I'm glad to see Jani's recounting of events as a sort of neutral third party.
http://robohub.org/3d-robotics-gets-30-million-to-mainstream-aerial...
@Chris.
You are right. Thank you for clearing the confusion. I received the FrSky (D4R-II), which is in fact a PPM receiver. As I read the text on the Rx it said 4 Channel, thus I was annoyed. Until now I was used to PWM outputs directly from RC Rx, so this took me by surprise. FYI: however, the link you posted was not accessible.
I will remove my earlier comments from the forum as it was my misunderstanding. I would however, still like to clarify on the 'B3 pro imax and the brand of the LIPO 4200mah batteries provided from 3DR, as it is no where mentioned when we place the order.
Thank you.
Regards,
Shyam
google code support different languages documentation. I participated in the creation of Russian documentation of arduplane. whether it would be possible on the new site?
Congrats to the CEO, co-founder and to all the people who have believed and worked on this project.
If you need someone to clean the toilets at the S.Diego headquarters I'm here (LOL), here in Italy it's all going to collapse! :P
John, I think I am one of the best person to answer on whole ArduCopter/AeroQuad question as it was me and my team here in DIYDrones who created ArduCopter originally. Me and Ted used to work on AeroQuad for several years and then we joined forces here like Chris said.
Ted stayed awhile but because he was too busy with he's own AeroQuad project he ended development and went back as full time leader of his own project.
I continued to be ArduCopter leader here, me and Jose Julio wrote ArduCopterNG software that was a next step towards more autonomous systems. Meanwhile Jason worked on background and learned hard how to do quadcopters and he integrated quadcopter features to original arduplane architecture. Later when that was mature enough we jumped to develop that and gave ArduCopterNG development to ArduPirates group who is still actively developing it along with MultiWii and others. I am also one of those original "multiwii" workhorses as we kicked it as a side project during our AeroQuad project on 2009/2010.
Nowdays I am running jDrones and are still active member on ArduCopter development and many other things around this whole project.
And NO, there was never money involved at beginning of AeroQuad / ArduCopter development.
Guy: Both the Pixhawk hardware and software will be entirely open source and the hardware design files will be released before the product ships. Our relationship with ETH just refers to which software distros the official sites will link to.
I think that is the nature of the beast and the delicate path being followed with open and closed source elements of a business, not to mention the number of people involved and feeling they are involved. It hits deeper and easier to get feelings hurt... and easier for misinformation to spread.
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