This Series C round brings together distinguished investors with a track record in industrial tech-focused firms. G2VP, our lead investor for this round, has significant expertise in technologies designed to advance traditional industries. Shell, Cisco and ABB’s capabilities in robotics, autonomous systems, industrial controls, and IoT platforms are well known. These market leaders are our strategic partners in our drive to provide comprehensive industrial drone solutions.
But what does this mean for our customers? Why take additional funding when business is organically growing? This simple answer is we want to accelerate market opportunities faster, deliver greater value, all while fueling innovation across multiple sectors. Most importantly, we want as many industrial workers across mining, construction, insurance, and adjacent markets to benefit from the Kespry Aerial Intelligence platform.
With this additional funding, we’ll pursue the following activities to drive exponential value for our customers:
1. Invest in our industry-specific solutions and deliver market leading capabilities – Today, we provide the most complete platform from aerial data capture to analysis to industry-specific applications. No other company has both the industrial focus coupled with a seamless user experience in this market. This investment round enables us to expand our Machine Learning and AI capabilities, add new sources of sensor-based data that can be captured and processed in our platform, and broaden the number of vertical use cases we support.
2. Expand our ecosystem – Historically, we’ve been directly supporting our users on the Kespry Cloud platform. We will continue adding deeper cloud capabilities, as well as enhancing how Kespry data can be experienced with integrations into the enterprise systems our customers use every day to drive their businesses.
3. Support new markets – We believe using a drone-based aerial intelligence platform can have 100X impacts on industrial processes – see the recent JMP Efficient Fifty list for their view – yet we’ve only just scratched the surface of game-changing use cases across the industries we serve. Our commitment to providing deep value through industry-leading use cases remains resolute. Next year, you’ll see Kespry extending our offerings into new verticals including the energy and logistics sectors.
So, it is with humility and a deep sense of purpose that we move forward. Our investors’ financial endorsement reiterates that we’re on the right path. That said, we are not taking the enthusiasm of our customers and investors for granted.
We know 2018 will be a year of significant company, product and team growth. We plan to deliver even more significant, positive impacts to industrial sectors, organizations and associated workers. While we are thrilled with the operational benefits of organizations using Kespry, the personal impacts are real motivators for our team. It’s a great feeling to know Kespry means workers are safer and more productive. Taj Anderson, a Quality Control manager at Poe Asphalt told us his powerful, personal story about how Kespry not only changed his job, but his life for the better.
“The information arrives so fast and it’s a lot safer,” Taj told us. “We’re already in a dangerous environment working in construction. With Kespry, the time savings allow me to spend more time with my family and that means everything to me. I’m no longer gone for a couple of weeks at a time. I don’t want to be out here 100 hours a week and I don’t have to be because of Kespry.”
Taj’s story and many more like his reflect the future of industrial work. And this is the generational shift that inspires Kespry to do insanely great work. I couldn’t be more proud of our team and the amazing ecosystem of customers, partners and investors that makes this our time to soar!
Onward and Upward,
George
@gkm1
