Sitting in a corner cubicle of their facility at hardware accelerator IKP Eden in Bengaluru’s start-up hub, Koramangala, Mrinal Pai and his colleague and co-founder of Skylark, Mughilan Thiru Ramasamy, are busy building the architecture of a new software that can customise the use of drones in a multitude of ways. One such project they have in hand, for example, is to enable a single pilot to control multiple drones or build a drone that can accomplish a task without anyone steering it from the ground.
In fact, some five months ago, when Kerala was hit by one of the worst floods in its history, it was Skylark which used several of its customisable drones to address the inundation and landslides that hit several parts of the state. The task at hand included mapping and taking stock of the damage, tracing the severity of the natural calamity and giving rescuers eyes in the sky. And it executed the task quite efficiently.
IKP Eden is home to several product start-ups including electric super-bike firm Emflux Motors, and offers occupants access to a common facility fitted with welding machines, hard cutters, 3D printers and CNC machines.
On a tour of the workshop, Pai, 26, says his team helped set up the facility which was not only a fun placem but had a homely feel to it. However, the workshop isn’t of much use to Pai and his team now, because the start-up has moved away from manufacturing of drones to working on drone software.
Skylark Drones has come a long way since it started out in 2014, beginning as an academic project at RV College of Engineering, Bengaluru. The company is now a leading provider of infrastructure surveillance and monitoring services to customers in domains ranging from mining to agriculture, energy to highways.
While Pai jumped on to the start-up right out of college, Ramasamy, 29, the other co-founder, studied on. He attended aerospace engineering at Purdue University at Indiana, in the US, which interestingly was also the alma mater of Neil Armstrong, the first human on the Moon.
Ramasamy says he was not initially sure whether his company would take off. “The first year we did all sorts of things, and there wasn’t any clear direction,” he explains. At that point, Skylark Drone supplied its products to one-off projects and film shoots and catered to excursion requests as well.
“Then we said, hey, let’s take a break. Let's review what we are doing. That took us another six months,” says Pai, joining in.
Somewhere in between, the company raised Rs two crore from a clutch of angel investors. That not only got brought in the resources to hire people, but also got advisors to help shape the business.
Even after several years of availability, drone adoption is still just about picking up. Drones bring in efficiency in processes that would take humans over 10X the time to accomplish, says Pai. He explains the several use cases his company supplies drone for. Take solar farms for example. These farms, typically spread across hundreds of acres, need someone to monitor the construction process accurately to ensure there are no glitches when the final plant is ready. Same is the requirement in constructing a highway or an oil plant.
Customers have hired Skylark Drones to survey the land before starting out a highway project, to review if mining is happening as planned, or if crops (in an agriculture field) are growing as desired.
Owing to such projects, Skylark Drones has developed expertise in mapping terrains. As a result it has moved to focus on plug-and-play software solutions that capture, map and analyse topography and deliver actionable results to clients, explains Pai.
Now 30-member strong, Skylark Drones is looking to raise funding for the next stage of growth. The plan is to hire more engineers and work on software solutions for drone. Founders Pai and Ramasamy are also active on the policy side and had worked closely with the aviation ministry in designing India’s policy for UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that came out last year.