Wingtra’s drones are used to perform surveying missions by organizations around the world, including NASA and the Army Corps of Engineers. Now, the startup is mapping out a new expansion strategy after landing $22 million in Series B funding, which it will use to improve its current tech and add new features.
“Our product roadmap is highly confidential, but let’s say our high-level vision looking a decade or so forth is to take people out of the loop and have completely automated data collection, processing and analysis,” co-founder and CEO Maximilian Boosfeld told TechCrunch.
Based in Zurich, Switzerland, with offices in Fort Lauderdale and Zagreb and nearly 200 employees, Wingtra says it is the world’s largest producer of commercial vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) drones. It makes mapping drones and develops software for fully autonomous flights, which collects and processes aerial survey data.
Wingtra drones are used by surveyors in a wide range of industries, including construction, mining, environmental monitoring, agriculture, urban planning and land management.
Out of the images collected with the WingtraOne drone
Investors in Wingtra’s Series B included DiamondStream Partners, EquityPitcher Ventures, Verve Ventures, the European Innovation Council Fund (EIC Fund), Ace & Company, and Spring Mountain Capital founder, John L. Steffens.
Wingtra was founded in 2014 when Boosfeld, Basil Weibel, Elias Kleimann and Sebastian Verling started working on a thesis while studying at ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab. The paper proposed a design for a small unmanned aerial vehicle that could take off and land vertically like a helicopter and transition to fixed-wing mode for long-range flight.
While working on their thesis, the four registered Wingtra to develop and commercialize the tech. They soon got accepted into the Wyss Zurich accelerator program, an incubator for commercializing scientific breakthroughs that was run by ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. They developed the WingtraOne, a mapping and surveying UAV, during the program.
Wingtra’s flagship drone is now the WingtraOne VTOL, which the company says is used by hundreds of businesses and organizations in 96 countries, including NASA, Texas A&M University, The Ohio State University, CEMEX, Rio Tinto, Army Corps of Engineers, and Kenya Red Cross. In total, the company’s drones make more than 100,000 flights each year and have mapped 18 million acres of land and sea.
The startup’s second-generation drone, released in 2021, is called the WingtraOne Gen II and can create survey-grade 2D and 3D maps with RGB cameras. Wingtra says that a single flight covering over 100 hectares can be digitized at 0.5 in/px, or up to 30 times faster and 90% cheaper than terrestrial surveying.
The three main industries Wingtra sells to are construction and industry, urban planning, and land development and mining.
Boosfeld told TechCrunch that the biggest challenge in managing such large assets is the availability of up-to-date, accurate and affordable data. Lack of data leads to inefficiencies, high costs and preventable CO2 emissions, but terrestrial surveying is labor intensive and can be dangerous and impossible to do without risking lives and fines when there are natural disasters like landslides.
Wingtra’s drones are meant to be operational under all those conditions. The startup says operators need minimal training to use the drone because of the WingtraPilot app’s simple operating system and automated route planning features.
One example of an organization that uses Wingtra drones to make collecting surveying data more efficient is the Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT), which uses them to oversee the upkeep and maintenance of the state’s roadway infrastructure. The ALDOT flies drones over construction projects each business day and uses the data to help ensure that erosion control measures, including silt fences, are installed properly.
Another example of how Wingtra is used is the Red Cross in Kenya, which deployed the startup’s drones and software to manage a major locust invasion. The gathered data was used to track the migration of locust swarms, estimate crop damage, and ultimately make decisions about how to mitigate the invasion.
In terms of competition, Wingtra’s best-known rivals are AgEagle’s eBee, and DJI’s Phantom 4 RTK and M300 drones. Boosfeld says the eBee paved the way for accessible, industry-level drone photogrammetry. Wingtra and AgEagle lead in the survey and mapping fields for different reasons: the eBee X is a well-industrialized and reliable fixed-wing survey and mapping drone, while WingtraOne offers a VTOL drone with top-grade image quality for coverage.
Wingtra’s key differentiation is its take-off and landing technology. On the other hand, the eBee X is a traditional fixed-wing drone that needs to be launched by hand and lands on its belly, which Boosfeld explained, means operators need to make sure launches and landings happen with wide clearance and on terrain that is dry and soft enough to support it.
He added that higher-end aerial mapping cameras are heavy, and fixed-wing drones like the eBee X cannot support their weight. “Currently, only VTOL drones can offer image resolution of 42MP, which translates to better accuracy, and ultimately, more reliable map reconstruction,” he said.
Speaking about DJI’s Phantom 4 RTK, Boosfeld said that even though it is marketed as a survey and mapping drone, it doesn’t have much in common with the WingtraOne. The Phantom 4 RTK is a typical multirotor, which means it behaves in the air like a helicopter. This means the WingtraOne is capable of the much broader coverage demanded by most mapping projects, while multirotors like Phantom 4 RTK can cover relatively limited areas.
According to Boosfeld, DJI’s M300 is a large multirotor that is good for inspection, search and rescue, and other medium-range applications, but is less efficient than dedicated mapping systems. For example, even though it is bigger than the Phantom 4, it is still a multirotor that relies exclusively on sizable batteries to lift it.
Wingtra also doesn’t have to deal with the political issues that DJI does in the U.S. market, where the latter is blacklisted by the U.S. Defense Department because of alleged ties to the Chinese military.
In a statement about the investment, DiamondStream Partners’ Dean Donovan said, “We are very excited about partnering with Wingtra. The product’s simplicity of use, its high reliability engineering, and the company’s global network of value-added resellers and service providers have positioned it to expand its leadership in the $83+ billion mapping segment of the aerial intelligence market globally. We look forward to helping the company in the United States and Latin America, which will be increasingly important geographies as Wingtra continues to expand.”