AirSpace Link, a Detroit-based startup has raised its seed funding of worth $4 million to automate flight path, FAA clearance for commercial drones, and to bring its services into the open market. This amount has been raised in two parts with $1 million as pre-seed round and $3 million as seed fund led by 2048 Ventures and Indicator Ventures.
Previously, KittyHawk and Airmap have also invested millions of dollars to develop technologies for air-traffic management in the cities.
According to the President and CEO of AirSpace Link, Michael Healander, the municipal governments are using AirSpace Link’s integration with mapping tools to provide information on ground-based risk. Michael states, “We’re creating the roads based on ground-based risk and we push that out into the drone community to let them know where it’s okay to fly.”
With a deep interaction and bonding with ESRI, a mapping firm that has served federal, state and local governments with its mapping capabilities and services; AirSpace Link has gained a great knowledge of terrestrial critical assets of towns and cities.
Michael explains, “We’ve just spent the past month understanding what regulation is going to be around to support it. In two years from now every drone will be live tracked in our platform.” He added, “Today we’re just authorizing flight plans.”
With the increasing number of drone operators, civilians seem to be at potential risk posed by the autonomous vehicles. Drones can be used to target concerts, sporting events, parking bays, or such other areas where people gather at huge level for potential attacks.
Julian King, the Commissioner at EU Security warns, “Drones are becoming more and more powerful and smarter which makes them more and more attractive for legitimate use, but also for hostile acts.”
To resolve this problem Michael Healander took a next step by stating, “We build out population data and give state and local governments a tool to create advisories for emergency events or any areas where high densities of people will be. That creates an advisory that goes through our platform to the drone industry.”
