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
Just keep it to IBM/PC .. I can't/wont hang with Mac/Apple... :-) And please don't move to China. Congrats on your funding
Hopefully not their soul :)
What exactly did 3DR sell to get $30M? What does 3DR own?
So I suppose next we are going to have to get a license to fly UAV's? Christ I am so tired of hearing about how the drones are going to fall out of the sky unless they are controlled to some extent. Sure accidents happen. Just look at at the statistics in vehicle accidents every year. I do not see drones ever reaching mass adaption as vehicles so take a pill and chill out a little. See how things pan out first before you make claims that the sky is going to be filled with drones dropping on our heads as soon as we step outside! Honestly what ever happened to personal responsibility in this country?
Well I think it is a difficult business model... on one hand you have a bunch of free labor and in life NOTHING is ever free.. if its free then you are the product. As a business you can't operate on 'free', you just can't.
With increased capital investment comes a bunch more voices at the table wanting dividends and returns on their investments.. which is hard to do when you have the free labor side attached and possible intellectual property issues in the future.
I applaud Chris for navigating these murky waters well and hopefully the additional voices at the table doesn't damage the company and the brand in the process.
Thanks, Bill. Your pioneering work has been an inspiration to all of us, and your generosity to me and Jordi in the early days is something we will always be grateful for. It's a tribute to your insights and technical prowess that six years later, you are still viewed as the go-to expert for our teams and others on everything from navigation algorithms to control theory. All I did was start a website; you actually made robots fly!
Chris,
I would like to point out to the community that there are several other presently active open-source autopilot projects that proceeded this community, such as Paparazzi and UDB, and which were really the kickstart for your project.
Paparazzi was started in 2003, and UDB was started in 2006, the year before this website was opened.
That said, I do add my congratulations to this thread. You have certainly done more than anyone else to promote this hobby, and to make it available to diydroners. You have created this community, no doubt about it, and I think you can claim that you have launched a new industry. We all owe you a debt of gratitude. I for one trust that you will continue to balance the the interests of this community and 3DRobotics. After all, your business will succeed only if you satisfy your market, and this is your market.
Also, I acknowledge that I am grateful to you for your many acts of kindness to me.
Best regards and every wish for your continued success,
Bill Premerlani
As one of the oldest members of the community till the beginning and first testers of earliest version Ardupilots, which i am proud of, i wish you more successful years in this drone business... Always felt like a member of a family at Diy Drones... Wish you good luck in a constantly growing industry and please dont lose this warm relations in Diy Dromes Family...
regards...
Thanks, Brent. I appreciate the nuance and civility.
As for the DroneCode Consortium, it doesn't exist yet but will be modeled after best-practice efforts such as the WordPress foundation (who have been our advisors). There will be some sort of board and governance structure. Much as I do today, I'll probably wear two hats, company and community (just as Matt Mullenweg does at WordPress/Automattic), but I'll just be one member of the board and the other members will be chosen to represent the best interests of the community broadly. Many of those members will be companies, in the same way that IBM and RedHat are members of the Linux Foundation.
As for that "kickstarted" phrase, I was as unhappy with that as everyone else. The article I wrote and was published in Wired Magazine, which I edited, had the headline shown below. An editor on the wired.com website later changed that headline to the "kickstarted" one, which were never my words. (The article itself doesn't use that phrase). Such headline changes by website editors is just one of those things that happen in a big distributed media company, but it's been a source of chagrin for me and I wish they hadn't done that.
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