Israeli startup Wonder Robotics, specialising in autonomous flight and landing of commercial drones, just closed $4 million in funding. The financing round was led by Elron Ventures (invested in Israeli SaaS startup Red Access) along with Besadno Investment Group.
Scaleup plans ahead
Wonder Robotics will use the proceeds of this round to scale up operation and marketing efforts, while developing technology for additional applications. It will help the company launch their drone-add that has autonomous take-off and landing abilities, and opens up a new era of drone deployments, already being utilised in the field.
“We are thrilled to take part in the drone revolution, by partnering with major industry players leveraging on our technology to launch their commercial multi-drone operations,” said Idan Shimon, co-founder, and CEO of Wonder Robotics. “Since raising the seed round, we have partnered with Spright, Air Methods’ new drone division, helping it realize its mission to improve access to urgently needed medical supplies for healthcare providers.”
“Wonder Robotics’ founding team are true industry experts and have the knowledge and technical expertise needed to enable a market waiting to take off, and establish WonderLand as an industry standard,” said Lauren Duke, Vice President of Business Development at Elron Ventures.
“Our investment in Wonder Robotics is perfectly aligned to our strategy of investing in domains where we can provide added value, by leveraging on our strategic partnership with Rafael and its validation platform for deep-tech ventures,” added Kobi Katz, Partner, and CTO at Elron Ventures and former VP and CIO at Rafael.
Paves way for drone revolution
Currently, the technology for operating drones beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) is lacking, which hinders the ability to provide safe, autonomous drone flights, making the commercialisation of drones expensive and unscalable. As a response, Wonder Robotics developed their unique “WonderLand” for precise autonomous landings, that can be installed on any drone.
Founded by Idan Shimon, Amnon Demri, Or Epstein in 2019 in Israel, Wonder Robotics paves the way for drone revolution. It claims its technology to be ideal for commercial package delivery, infrastructure inspection, mapping, and advanced urban mobility for people (UAM). The vision of this startup is to expand the offering to include horizontal situational awareness for navigation, obstacle detection, avoidance, and safe precision landing in the case of denied GPS.
Wonder Robotics’ smart safety layer includes vertical awareness and robust precision landing, permitting drone safety beyond the operator/mission manager’s visual line of sight.
In urban environments, this can prevent collisions with people and natural and infrastructural impediments such as trees, cables, buildings, and other dynamic environmental factors. It clears landing zones in real-time, enables emergency autonomous contingency landings, in unprepared, uncharted, and unattended sites
