Skydio HQ Tour: Skydio Commits $3.5 Billion to Expand U.S. Manufacturing

Adam Bry is the co-founder and CEO of Skydio, the largest US drone manufacturer and, as of today, the company behind a $3.5 billion commitment to expand American manufacturing over the next five years. We spent the day at Skydio's San Mateo headquarters for a full tour of their facilities. On the tour: The rooftop dock array (drones as cloud infrastructure) DFR Command, flown live The "wind wall" stress-testing hardware 24/7 R10, the new indoor tactical drone F10, a fixed-wing thrown and caught by a robotic arm X10 water rescue demo with the auto-inflating rest tube The $3.5B announcement involves a new US facility five times the size of the current one (Skydio's fifth expansion in eight years), over 2,000 new Skydio jobs, 3,000+ additional roles across the US supply chain, and more than $1 billion directed to domestic suppliers under a new program called SkyForge. Skydio already manufactures more dual-use drones than any company outside of China. This is the bet to keep it that way. The backdrop: 60,000 drones shipped, 3,800+ customers, 1,200+ public safety agencies, every branch of the US military, and 29 allied nations. Skydio DFR now arrives on scene first 71% of the time and resolves nearly a quarter of calls without dispatching a patrol unit. Adam Bry: https://x.com/adampbry Molly O’Shea: https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • Brex https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. https://brex.com/sourcery • Turing https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. https://turing.com/sourcery•VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio athttp://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • Deel https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: https://www.deel.com/sourcery • Public http://public.com/sourcery–Investing platform Public just launched Generated Assets https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. https://public.com/sourcery https://public.com/sourcery • Merge https://merge.dev—The leading provider of customer-facing integrations and agentic tools for frontier LLMs, Fortune 500 organizations, and B2B SaaS companies. Visit https://merge.dev Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at public.com/disclosures/ga http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) A flight every 30 seconds (00:57) Rooftop docks (03:26) Tour roadmap (04:42) Adam's RC airplane origin story (06:10) Flying a dock drone, live (10:04) The "force multiplier" moment (12:16) Multi-drone operations (14:17) Unarmed sensor platforms and the China context (15:29) Why community acceptance surprised Adam (19:31) The wind wall (20:40) R10, built for indoor tactical (23:30) Flying R10 through a barricaded-suspect scenario (27:30) Reading oil and gas gauges with a drone (29:26) F10, the fixed-wing caught by a robotic arm (30:40) X10 water rescue demo

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So on average now, in public safety, our customers are flying once every 30 seconds, and that's

• 0:05Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 0:06Speaker 00

  Yeah. So almost every minute now, there's some story like this, where there's like a missing person or a stolen vehicle, and the drone getting there quickly just fundamentally changes outcomes. It's really lifesaving technology. People don't really understand how deployed and impactful these things already are, so I'm excited to talk about that. Customers use the term force multiplier. Basically, you can have the drones be doing autonomous actions on your behalf, and this is where the AI and autonomy piece comes in. I think, you know, we're headed for a Jetsons-like future, where we just have drones doing all kinds of useful stuff. This campus is slowly evolving into drone mecca. Our goal is to just have this be like the most exciting place in the world.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  So this is what the future of drone use looks like. So the old way of flying a drone was like, you hold a controller, you need to be a skilled pilot, if you know what you're doing, you can do useful stuff. The new way is the drones live in these network-connected charging base stations. We call them docks.

• 1:12Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:13Speaker 00

  And they're just available to fly 24/7. So these things are flying themselves fully autonomously. There's no person in the loop. The dock keeps them charged, connected to the network, it'll heat them, it'll cool them, it'll do whatever it needs to do. And it basically turns them into flying robot infrastructure, where the person who uses them never has to touch them, never has to physically interact with the hardware. It's a little bit just like using a cloud server. And it puts the drones in a position to just constantly do useful work for people in the background. And it's a fully autonomous robotic system.

• 1:45Molly O'Shea?

  Are they going on a mission right now? What are they doing?

• 1:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're flying pre-programmed missions now. So the number one feature for us is reliability, like making this stuff work end-to-end, bulletproof, day, night, wind, rain. That's the hard part. And so these things are our testing rig. They're just continuously flying 24/7, getting as many cycles as we can in every condition. But it's mimicking, of course, what our customers do in their environments. So these things are deployed at energy utilities, at construction companies, for law enforcement and public safety, for base security. And our customers expect them to work all the time, and so that's what we're testing here.

• 2:25Molly O'Shea?

  When you decided to put these up here, why did you decide how many are up here? And are they all different in some capacity? Or they all do the same thing?

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Well, we really want as many as we can. We have drones doing different jobs up here. So we have what we call our endurance rig, which is this line here.

• 2:41Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  So these ones are just constantly available for autonomous testing. We have others over there that we're using to give customer demos. So the best way for customers to understand what the product can do is to fly it themselves and see different representative missions. And so our sales team, which is all over the country, all over the world, they're constantly logging in and flying those docks over there. You know, in software, there's this idea of continuous integration. Like, one of the big evolutions over the last decade in software engineering is just getting faster and faster feedback cycles. When you write a piece of code, you can deploy it and test it very quickly. And I think this is one of the first examples of doing that in real life with hardware. Because we have this fully autonomous device, we don't need people to be in the loop of testing.

• 3:26Speaker 00

  So you can sort of think of this as like continuous integration for our development process with real autonomous hardware in the loop.

• 3:33Molly O'Shea?

  OK, so we are at the headquarters.

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:37Molly O'Shea?

  How is the headquarters set up? We're going to go through a couple of different things today. What's the flow?

• 3:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I wanted to start here because this is the end result. Making all this stuff work the way that it is right now is super hard. And that's what the vast majority of the company is focused on, is just making these things work in a reliable way. We will give you a feel for what it's like to actually fly one of these things remotely. We'll look at some of the new vehicles we're developing, which I'm super excited about. We'll show you kind of the like ultimate stress testing rigs that we use to put these things through the paces. And then I'm excited to talk about, you know, the impact that this is already having today with customers. Because I think because the industries we serve are a little bit out of sight, you know, people don't think a lot about what is Caltrans doing to keep the road safe?

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Or what is PG&E doing to inspect their infrastructure? People don't really understand how deployed and impactful these things already are. So I'm excited to talk about that.

• 4:34Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. OK.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Sweet.

• 4:42Molly O'Shea?

  Is this one of your first drones?

• 4:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this is an artifact from my arguably misspent childhood. So I grew up flying radio-controlled airplanes. And this is like-

• 4:53Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, it has your name on it?

• 4:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I was a pilot. So this is like an extreme-

• 4:57Molly O'Shea?

  You fit in there?

• 4:58Speaker 00

  No. Although you could put a small child in there. So this is like, most people don't even know this exists. This is kind of a crazy hobby. And I was really lucky to be doing it because a lot of the things that I learned there, certainly about building these things, it's a little bit like NASCAR where a big part of success in competition is like the engineering and design of the aircraft itself. And then the other half is how well you can fly it. So I learned a lot about building these things. Then I also learned a lot, just at an intuitive level, about aerodynamics and control systems, which is what got me interested in engineering. This plane has been crashed. So there's a maneuver, people call it a torque roll, where you basically, they have such extreme thrust to weight that they can hover just on the propeller. So the plane comes in, it hovers on the propeller.

• 5:42Speaker 00

  And I forgot to put gas in it. So I was flying it like two feet off the ground, and I ran out of gas. And so it came down, smashed the tail. And I had a major competition like three months later. So we had to do some emergency repairs. And then the color scheme was just something that I came up with. I think it was actually from the Atlanta Thrashers ice hockey team. They're not even around anymore, but I thought they had a cool color scheme.

• 6:03Molly O'Shea?

  This is awesome.

• 6:10Speaker 00

  So have you ever flown a drone before?

• 6:11Molly O'Shea?

  I have not.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  Alright, you're gonna do a lot of drone flying today. So you saw the docks up on the rooftop. But most of the people, the whole point is that most of the people that are flying a docked drone never have to physically touch it, interact with it. You don't even need to be in the same zip code or country. If you have an internet connection, you can fly it. So this is a piece of software we call DFR Command. Drone is First Responder Command. So this is designed for emergency response. And this is the interface that most of our customers experience drones through now. So you've got kind of the map of the world. This is our office park. And then it's unfortunately a crime-ridden office park.

• 6:48Molly O'Shea?

  Oh no!

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Exactly, yeah.

• 6:50Molly O'Shea?

  What kind of crime you got here?

• 6:51Speaker 00

  Well, we can click around and see. Somebody improperly parked over in the field. Got a suspicious vehicle. But in a real environment, these would be 911 calls that are coming in. So the incident 911 call happens, it'll appear on this map. The operator would see a description of it. And then it's at their discretion if they think drone could have an impact. So if I want to respond to, for example, this suspicious vehicle, I'll just click over here, respond here, select the drone that I want. And one of those docks on the rooftop is now opening up.

• 7:23Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you can see the rooftop of the dock opening up. All the software's booting up. And it's autonomously planning a path to figure out where it needs to go. So I just click launch, and that's it. With one click now, the drone's taking off. It uses a wayfinding technology we've developed called Pathfinder, so it knows where buildings, terrain, everything, airspace regulations. And it can autonomously fly its way out there. We want this campus to be a little window into the future.

• 7:54Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  But I think, you know, we're headed for a Jetsons-like future, where we just have drones continuously flying, doing all kinds of useful stuff for us.

• 8:01Molly O'Shea?

  When you got this building, did you have to get certain licenses?

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Well, we have to, we get permission from the FAA to do this.

• 8:09Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  So there's this concept of flying beyond visual line of sight, which basically means that, like, the old way of flying a drone is you have somebody who's holding a controller looking at the drone, and the regulations were originally written with that in mind. For us and for all of our customers, we get what's called a beyond visual line of sight, or BVLOSS waiver, to do what we're doing here, where I can't see this drone, but it's still safe and legal to fly it. And we always make friends with our neighbors. Neighbors generally come to love the drones. So now that it's gotten to the incident, I can take control and fly it around. So here's the part where you fly.

• 8:47Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, interesting, okay.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Have you ever played a video game like Counter-Strike or anything?

• 8:51Molly O'Shea?

  Nope, not at all.

• 8:53Speaker 00

  All right. We're gonna test the learning curve. So the first thing, if you just use the mouse... You can look around.

• 8:59Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, well, I just, yeah, okay.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  So if you want to like, you go down, you'll see the road.

• 9:05Molly O'Shea?

  And it just, wherever you point it?

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Wherever you point, it goes.

• 9:08Molly O'Shea?

  When I was at Archer, I went to Archer and I did a helicopter simulator.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:12Molly O'Shea?

  I did the Archer simulator.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 9:14Molly O'Shea?

  I will never fly a helicopter. This does seem easier than a helicopter, I will give you that.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that, now you're looking around. If you want to fly around, you use these keys like arrow keys. So you can put your left hand there, and then W forward. So if you hold W, you go forward.

• 9:34Molly O'Shea?

  What's the furthest we can go?

• 9:35Speaker 00

  So we have a geofence here, this green line. So you can, you just keep holding forward, it'll keep you safe. The software is designed such that you really can't mess it up. Like, it's got onboard collision avoidance, there's a bunch of AI and autonomy stuff that's keeping you safe. And it's really important for our customers, because we want them thinking about the mission. We don't want them having to think about being like a skilled expert drone pilot. So the other thing that can be fun to do, if you hold spacebar, you'll go up. You can just hold it all the way.

• 10:01Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really powerful cameras on these things. So you can zoom in, read a license plate at 800 feet, detect a person at a couple miles. But one of my favorite things to do is just grab a car. So if you point down at the road here.

• 10:17Molly O'Shea?

  I'm really waving this mouse around.

• 10:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. So now your hands off.

• 10:23Molly O'Shea?

  Targeted.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  So now this car's being tracked. So we see its location on the map. The drone is autonomously following it, without you having to do anything. And this is one of these things, like the customers use the term force multiplier. But basically, you can have the drones be doing autonomous actions on your behalf, without you having to be doing low-level control. And this is where the AI and autonomy piece comes in. Like, our goal is to build the skills of an expert pilot into the drone.

• 10:53Molly O'Shea?

  And then it just traces the?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 10:56Molly O'Shea?

  The geofence?

• 10:57Speaker 00

  Yep. So it'll follow the geofence, it'll eventually run out of room here, because we've got it fenced in, it can't leave our corporate campus. But this stuff is super powerful in the hands of, you know, the critical industries that depend on drones like this.

• 11:14Molly O'Shea?

  So in a use case scenario, we're on a high-speed pursuit.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:19Molly O'Shea?

  Does this happen quite frequently?

• 11:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. So on average now, in public safety, our customers are flying once every 30 seconds.

• 11:27Molly O'Shea?

  What?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. I mean, this is across the nation 24/7. So almost every minute now, there's some story like this, where there's like a missing person, or a stolen vehicle, or a potentially armed suspect. And the drone getting there quickly and getting that real-time information just fundamentally changes outcomes. Because officers on the ground know what they're heading into, they can get better information quickly, they can send the right kind of response for whatever the situation demands. And it's really lifesaving technology. It's like, this is the most meaningful, motivating stuff for us. Like, every day now, we hear some story where, you know, there was somebody who had an overdose. There was an anonymous call, they had no idea where this person was, they used the drone to find him in a couple minutes, got there, did CPR, saved his life. And without the drone, like, it probably would've taken them a couple hours to find

• 12:12Speaker 00

  this person. And that's just happening all the time. So right now, we just flew one drone. The other aspect of this, which is really important, is being able to fly multiple drones at the same time. So if I, say, want to do an inspection, I have this, this is like, sort of, another corner of application. So I have this pre-planned mission, where we've got all these transmission towers, or on our campus, they're just distribution poles. On the customer site, they can be transmission towers. We know where they are, we've pre-mapped them, so we know the location of all the poles. And then I've got this, we call it asset-centric inspection, but this mission that'll go off

• 12:56Speaker 00

  and do those inspections. So I just say, "Yep, this looks good, I want to run it." I can see the mission there in 3D, and I'm gonna kick off a second drone now to go and do that flight. The first one is still in the air, so it's a little bit just like playing a multiplayer video game or something, where you have multiple agents out there that are doing work on your behalf. So we click launch, and the second drone is now gonna launch itself and go and execute the inspection mission. And we actually see a lot of these things coming together with customers. So site security is our biggest, fastest-growing application, where they do a combination of responding to incidents. But if you think about a data center where you'd be doing site security with one of

• 13:39Speaker 00

  these, you also have a ton of infrastructure that needs inspecting, like it could be power infrastructure, it could be cooling infrastructure, and so being able to use the same asset to respond to incidents as well as inspect stuff that would be much slower, more dangerous for people to do on the ground, is very, very powerful. So this thing's out now, and it's basically just capturing a pre-programmed set of shots that we know we need to document. So it's going after this distribution pull here, and it has a very precise set of motions that it needs to do to get all the data to know if that thing is in a good, healthy state.

• 14:17Molly O'Shea?

  And just to be clear, these ones are not armed. I talk to a lot of defense companies.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. These are unarmed drones, yes. These are basically flying sensor platforms, and we sell very similar products to the military. Our class of drones to the military is what they call ISR, Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance, so it's basically the same thing. It's a flying sensor platform. I mean, I think there's a lot happening in the drone space, and the competition with China, the national security stakes, the military applications, I think are super important, and we're involved in that stuff, we're proud to work with the military. But I think there's this whole other, already large-scale, massive-impact set of applications that are really life-saving things that most people don't see and appreciate.

• 15:06Speaker 00

  And for us, it's pretty horizontal technology. I mean, it's like building a computer or something. You can use it for all different kinds of things. It's really the software that defines how you interact with it and what the capabilities are. Probably the single biggest, I would say, positive surprise that I've had over the last five years is the level of community acceptance and buy-in and really excitement for the law enforcement application of these things. And I think the credit really goes to our customers, our law enforcement customers. There's just an extreme degree of transparency here. So when a new agency launches their drone program, they're doing everything they can to be vocal and proactive about what they're doing. The chief will oftentimes hold a press conference. They'll show the drones, they'll show examples of how they're using it. And then, we also have a product feature called the Transparency Portal,

• 15:51Speaker 00

  where they can publish the flying that they're doing for people in their community, anybody in their community to go and log in and see like where they flew and why they did it. And I think when people see it, they get it. It's pretty hard to argue with. You know, when you see videos of it like finding an injured person, or catching a suspect fleeing a scene, or finding out that, you know, the person was holding a broomstick, not a gun.

• 16:10Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  It's really lifesaving stuff. And they're, you know, they're real concerns about privacy. But I think the best answer to privacy is actually transparency as well, for agencies to be accountable for the flying that they're doing, and for the public to be able to see it, to make sure that they're not spying on somebody in their backyard.

• 16:23Molly O'Shea?

  When I was walking in here, and even in this room, you definitely have some trophies and some other things that you like to show off.

• 16:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:30Molly O'Shea?

  Okay, so what is, what is going on here?

• 16:32Speaker 00

  Uh, so there's a big challenger coin culture with a lot of our customers. So, most agencies, most people don't know this, but like police agencies make, they call them challenger coins, but they're basically like the logo, the brand of the agency that's using it. Some of my favorites, we'll see if we have it in here, our drones are starting to show up on more and more of these challenger coins.

• 16:54Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, no way.

• 16:54Speaker 00

  For the drone teams, which is a fun thing to see. So these are some of the agencies that we work with.

• 17:01Molly O'Shea?

  What's your favorite?

• 17:02Speaker 00

  Uh, I can't name a favorite.

• 17:04Molly O'Shea?

  See, that one's pretty intense.

• 17:06Speaker 00

  The one that's a drone itself?

• 17:07Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's a good one. We like that one.

• 17:12Molly O'Shea?

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• 18:41Molly O'Shea?

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• 19:31Speaker 00

  This beast we call the Windwall, this is a fully autonomous testing rig. So this is, again, just running unattended 24/7. So it's a bunch of drone propellers that generate 30, 35 miles an hour of wind. And then we've got a docks sitting in front of it. So we can create all kinds of extreme wind conditions here. We can put the dock in different orientations. We've even built variations of this where we can rain on it.

• 20:32Molly O'Shea?

  That's a good way to start the morning.

• 20:40Speaker 00

  So this building is the domain of R10, which is a new drone for us, and it's specifically designed for indoor operation. So a lot of the most dangerous work in public safety and in critical infrastructure inspection happens indoors in very confined spaces. And it's actually kind of natural habitat for us because our drones have computer vision AI. They can map the environment. They can fly in challenging spaces. But we didn't have a drone form factor that was exactly right for that. So over the last year, we've run a super-fast, awesome program to build our first specially-designed indoor drone. So it looks like Ben's got some math up there. Can we look at some of the design of R10?

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 00

  Yeah. Ben's an OG. He's been with us 11 years?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. He was in the... Since almost the beginning, yeah.

• 21:31Speaker 00

  Since the semi-legal house in Atherton. That was our first office.

• 21:34Molly O'Shea?

  In Atherton.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  And actually, when the owner found out what we were doing, he wondered if we would pay the rent in equity. Which luckily, we did not do. He would have been happy about it. So Ben's played a major role in designing every drone we've ever made. I don't know. You want to take us for a spin on what we're looking at here?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure, yeah. I guess you haven't flown this yet, but you're gonna find it.

• 21:56Speaker 00

  We'll find it in a bit.

• 21:57Molly O'Shea?

  Nice to meet you.

• 21:58Speaker 02

  And basically, we wanted to build something that is small so we could possibly make a drone for indoor flying that has a couple of the features that customers really want. Like it's got headlights so you can see in the darkness, a speaker, microphone, super robust, easy to fly, portable, kind of checks all the boxes for indoor tactical sort of scenarios. So this is what that looks like. So our computer system is all in the middle. We have cameras along the front for the user to see what they're looking at, but also for the obstacle avoidance system to work. It has a bunch of lights. Like these are new diodes here that'll illuminate a really dark space really nicely. Microphones. It's got a speaker on the back.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  The thing that I think is, you were talking about how hard it is to make these things. Like drones can be, they can fool people because like, "Oh, it's small, it's kind of like a piece of consumer electronics or something." But designing these things is really akin designing like a rocket ship or an aircraft. Because there's just so much physical constraint, vibrations, thermals, aerodynamics. And because it's small, it's actually harder. Like, most of the ways that you solve problems in engineering is you add weight. Like, "Oh, we have a thermal problem, the way we'll fix that is we'll just like add a giant heat sink on it." You can't do that on a drone, or if you do it, you're gonna pay a cost in terms of flight time and performance. And so it's this awesome game of just making every gram and every part count as much as it can. And basically, if you do it well, you're up against the laws of physics in every dimension.

• 23:22Speaker 00

  These things just operate right at the edge of what's physically possible to get as much capability as you can into a small, easy form factor. So we should, we fly it?

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Sweet.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  Here's the real thing.

• 23:34Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my god!

• 23:37Speaker 00

  It's real.

• 23:38Molly O'Shea?

  It's real!

• 23:41Speaker 00

  You're gonna fly?

• 23:43Molly O'Shea?

  Well, no.

• 23:45Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 23:45Molly O'Shea?

  No way.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 23:47Molly O'Shea?

  No, I'm gonna crash it. Oh, alright, thank you, okay.

• 23:49Speaker 00

  Alright, just straight at it.

• 23:51Speaker 03

  All you need to do is you need to slide that little slider over to launch the aircraft. It's gonna take off on its own. You can fly through that doorway.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Don't crash it!

• 24:04Molly O'Shea?

  I'm going to!

• 24:05Speaker 00

  You can't crash it, that's the whole point.

• 24:07Molly O'Shea?

  Are you sure about that?

• 24:09Speaker 00

  Yep. Pretty sure.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  So if you now use the left stick again to maybe yaw to your right. And...

• 24:15Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, what is going on in here?

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Go enter this house.

• 24:18Molly O'Shea?

  Looks like a crime scene.

• 24:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this would be like, you know, a real life situation. You could have an armed suspect in there, and rather than sending a cop in who's either gonna get shot at and maybe have to shoot back, you send the drone in so they just know exactly what they're heading into. So just push forward.

• 24:35Molly O'Shea?

  We got a fan there, some wind in here. How do I go higher?

• 24:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, that stick up for, like, away from you a little bit.

• 24:41Molly O'Shea?

  Like this?

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  So this is like world-class drone piloting stuff, right? You're flying in a super confined space, a couple feet around you, flying through very narrow passage space.

• 24:53Molly O'Shea?

  This door looks really difficult.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  You've got it. Just push forward.

• 24:56Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 24:56Speaker 00

  Does the return feature work?

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Uh, probably.

• 25:00Speaker 00

  Should we try it?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  We should try it.

• 25:02Speaker 00

  Nothing like doing it live.

• 25:03Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, try it. What do I do?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  So we would just hit this button and we say return to launch. And what it's going to do is retrace its steps in an effort to come back to where it started.

• 25:16Molly O'Shea?

  So intense.

• 25:18Speaker 00

  All right, we gotta get a high five.

• 25:20Molly O'Shea?

  All right.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  No, on camera.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  That was awesome.

• 25:25Speaker 03

  So yeah, you've made it back. And all we need to do to land the drone is we would push a whole button.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  And your flight's complete.

• 25:41Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. And the police are here.

• 25:46Speaker 04

  Attention, attention. Please exit the area immediately. I repeat, please exit the area immediately.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  So it's, I mean, this is a real thing because you can fly into any confined space. If you have a barricaded suspect or something, you can land this, perch for hours, and establish two-way communication without ever putting a person in harm's way. Another lifesaving piece of tech.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  Sweet.

• 26:10Molly O'Shea?

  Quick note before we keep going. I've been investing on Public for a while now, and it's a really solid platform that combines stocks, bonds, options, and crypto with incredible AI tools that let you do things like build a completely custom investable index from a prompt. Right now, Public will give you an uncapped 1% match when you transfer your portfolio. Check it out at public.com/sorcery. Public: Investing for those who take it seriously. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in the description. V C X by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View the portfolio at getvcx.com. That's getvcx.com. Founders ship faster on deal.

• 26:54Molly O'Shea?

  Set up payroll for any country in minutes. Hire anyone, anywhere. Get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit D E E L dot com slash sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash S O U R C E R Y. Enterprise AI runs on Merge, the AI infra platform for integrations, agent tooling and model orchestration. So your team's ship product, not plumbing. Mistral, Dropbox and Drata already trust Merge in production. Start building at merge.dev.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  So that was indoor tactical drone R10. The other new program that we're working on that we're super, and that thing's about to ship. That is already in customers' hands and will be generally available in the next few weeks. So we're ramping up production of that in Hayward. So that's indoors. The other big need that our customers have is covering much larger areas at higher speeds. So if you have a high-speed vehicle pursuit, quadcopters are great. They're super versatile, but they can't go 100 miles an hour, at least not ones that are carrying the sensor packages that we have. Okay. So we have started work. We wanted to do as much as we can to get fast feedback cycles and do the jobs that our customers are actually doing with our products. So this is something like you'd find

• 28:13Speaker 00

  at an oil and gas facility that you might need to inspect. So this is basically a test rig for us to inspect ourselves. So those docked drones on the rooftop, one of the automated missions that I could run would be to come over and inspect this thing. And it would fly in. It would read the gauges. Believe it or not, you can actually use an autonomous drone to fly in and read a steam gauge. Wow. And that's a real need that people have. But you could also look. We have a leak. Exactly, yeah. You could see the leak. You could look for corrosion. And doing that with a drone saves a person from having to go in. It saves them time. And it also keeps them safer. So we've got this. We've got a bunch of substation equipment on the other side of the parking lot. And we're using these things for testing and development.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  We're also using them to show customers. So if a customer is evaluating purchasing the product, they could log into one of those docks, fly out, do the inspection and get a real feel for what would this do for me in my operating environment, the things that I care about.

• 29:14Molly O'Shea?

  You guys have like the most insane obstacle courses everywhere.

• 29:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. So you flew the R10. The R10 is about super confined spaces, super short distances, very dangerous situation. The other need that our customers have are high speed, long range. So we sell to county sheriff's office that covered thousands of square miles. We sell to energy utilities with tens of thousands of miles of lines that need to be inspected. And the answer to that is a fixed wing. Like if you want to go fast, if you want to go far, you need a wing. It's just a much more efficient way to generate lift. The challenge with a fixed wing is how do you dock it? Like, we really want these things to be docked and remote operation capable. And the answer to that seems a little crazy. But the answer to that is a robotic arm.

• 30:00Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 30:03Speaker 00

  This is our prototype fixed wing vehicle. So this is called F10. It's reusing a lot of the same core technology blocks from F10 and R10, but it's in a fixed wing form factor. They can fly 100 miles an hour, has a couple hours of flight time. And it is launched and caught by a robotic arm. So this robotic arm picks it up out of its charging station, puts it in the air, lets it go, basically throws it. It goes off and flies the mission and then it comes back, gets caught and gets stowed away to drone.

• 30:31Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. Wow.

• 30:39Speaker 00

  This campus is slowly evolving into drone mecca. Like, our goal is to just have this be like the most exciting place in the world, where all the cool drone stuff is happening. When we start a new program, like a new drone that we're building, we'll typically take a small cross-functional team and give them their own space so that they can just... Get hyper focused. So this is the X10, same drone that we flew out of the dock. You can also fly it the old school way with a controller and there's still plenty of great work to be done with that. So the main point of the drone is the sensor package. This thing that's carried to the front, this gimbal says three axis stabilized, bunch of great sensors, lets us zoom in, incredible detail at long ranges. But sometimes you want

• 31:20Speaker 00

  to do other things. So you can put a spotlight on this. You've got these attachment ports. You can put a speaker on it. One of the most common requests we got from public safety was helping people in the water in trouble. There's a lot of coastline work here. So this originally came up with NYPD, the beaches around New York. So this thing is called a REST tube. It's an auto inflating life preserver. This is our dropper.

• 31:45Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 31:47Speaker 00

  And it's all carried by X10 and we're going to put it to the test.

• 31:50Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 31:51Speaker 00

  This is the flight interface. I'll swipe up to take off.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  Do you want to do the drop or do you want me to?

• 32:01Molly O'Shea?

  No, you got it. Yeah, you got it.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  We should, we should head over here.

• 32:09Molly O'Shea?

  There's the water button.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:11Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my God.

• 32:12Speaker 00

  You could fall in and drown if you want.

• 32:14Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, that's too funny. How did that get here?

• 32:20Speaker 00

  So I just open up dropper. I say, look down. I get nice little target crosshairs there. Do some wind corrections.

• 32:28Molly O'Shea?

  Wind correction, yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 00

  Fancy math. You seem scared.

• 32:33Molly O'Shea?

  I just, I don't know.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  It's gonna be great. Don't worry about it.

• 32:38Molly O'Shea?

  That's impressive.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  Over time, you're going to see more and more of this of like drones doing things to interact with people on the ground and provide help. So when we're done, I just hold the land.

• 32:59Molly O'Shea?

  Mission accomplished.

• 32:59Speaker 00

  Mission accomplished.

• 33:00Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:02Molly O'Shea?

  Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once a week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.