Dive Brief:

• Austin, TX-based startup Hangar Technology raised $6.5M to provide drone technology as a service, offering flights, data collection and analytics to companies looking to outsource UAV technology.
• Hangar president Colin Guinn told TechCrunch that he sees a market opportunity in the split between companies that are looking for aerial data but don’t have in-house piloting talent and drone operators with extended flying expertise but little appetite for business development and sales.
• Lux Partners led this latest $6.5M raise by Hangar Technologies, and a Lux representative told TechCrunch that Hangar isn’t just another DaaS outfit, primarily because it is automating data acquisition and analysis.

Dive Insight:

While other companies have also entered the drone-as-a-service (DaaS) marketplace, Hangar intends to be one of the first to automate data acquisition and predictive analytics in addition to providing flight services and electronic delivery of photography, charts, graphs, maps and video to clients in construction and other key industry verticals.

Hangar is now in the company of such firms as Drone Deploy, which are touting automation of data as well as mapping and modeling capabilities of drone technology, with delivery to easy-to-understand mobile interfaces. Earlier this year, DroneDeploy announced it had raised $20 million in a series B funding round led by Scale Ventures Partners, bringing the total company investment to $31 million.

Standardization of drone data collection and transmission technologies looks imminent, as DroneDeploy integrated flight log data on Oct. 18 with Airnest, Drone Complier, DroneLogbook, Healthy Drones, Kitty Hawk, NVDrones and Skyward. 

Since the FAA released its commercial drone regulations in June, UAV technology has taken off and is expected to generate significant revenues in the construction industry An April report from the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International found that construction and infrastructure were the two industries that used drones the most, representing nearly 40% of all FAA-approved exemptions.