Airware

» see airware.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Airware told its staff on 14 September 2018 that the company was closing that day. Not winding down over a quarter, not shopping itself to a buyer: the doors shut on a Friday with about 140 people inside them and $118 million of venture money already spent.

Jonathan Downey founded it in 2011 in Newport Beach, the son of two pilots, and the first product was a flight controller. Not a drone of its own at that stage: the control board and the software stack you put inside somebody else's airframe so it could fly a route by itself and come back with usable data. Insurance adjusters working roofs, mining companies measuring stockpiles, anti-poaching patrols. The company moved to San Francisco in January 2014.

The money was serious and so were the names attached to it. Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins were in early, Google's venture arm followed, Intel and Cisco's John Chambers put money in, and Caterpillar became both an investor and the customer that made the whole thesis look real. Next World Capital led a $30 million round in March 2016. Airware bought Redbird, a French drone analytics company with a 38-person team in Paris, the same year.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the bet ~

The thesis was that commercial drone work would turn out to be a software business, and that whoever owned the flight stack and the analytics would sit above whoever molded the plastic. That was a reasonable thing to believe in 2013. Then Airware built its own hardware anyway.

By the time it shipped, DJI was selling airframes that flew better and cost less, with an SDK attached, out of Shenzhen at a manufacturing cadence nobody in California was going to match. Airware killed its own hardware line in 2016 and pivoted to pure software, which was the right call arriving two years before the money ran out, and two years is not enough time to rebuild a company around a different premise.

~ the four days ~

Four days before the shutdown, Airware announced a Tokyo headquarters with an investment and a partnership from Mitsubishi behind it. Then it closed. That gap is the most informative thing in the entire story, because it says the people announcing the Japanese expansion and the people counting what was left in the account were not, in any functional sense, talking to each other.

~ what got buried with it ~

I work on computer vision for unmanned aircraft, in Ankara, on the edge-compute end of it. Airware's name still comes up in this field, though it comes up as a warning rather than as a product anyone integrated with. The lesson people usually draw is the hardware one. What interests me more is the compute: Airware was selling autonomous inspection flight in 2013, running on whatever processing you could bolt to an airframe in 2013, and that was not very much processing.

The assets went to auction in October 2018. Delair, a drone manufacturer in Toulouse, took the Redbird analytics software and the 26 people still running it, which means the French company Airware bought in 2016 went back to France. The flight-controller business Downey started with did not sell at all. The flight stack most commercial operators fly today is either DJI's or open source, and neither one has a hundred and eighteen million dollars to earn back.

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