Flyby Robotics, a Los Angeles, CA and Phoenix, AZ-based end-to-end drone automation and delivery company, raised $4M in Pre-Seed funding.
The round was led by MaC Venture Capital, with participation from Weekend Fund, Anthemis, Evening Fund, Naval Ravikant, (Co-Founder of AngelList), Balaji Srinivasan, (Finance and former CTO of Coinbase), Karen Pritzker, Gaingels, Ryan Hoover (Founder at Product Hunt) and Cliff Sirlin.
The company intends to use the funds to support technical development acceleration and pilots to new cities across the US.
Led by Jason Lu, Founder and CEO, Flyby Robotics is building end-to-end automation for drone delivery. The company has already developed a package deployment system, which gently winches products down from a hovering drone to customers’ doorsteps.
This news comes alongside their pilot launch and a series of active partnerships with food retailers and innovative snack brands across the US. The first cohort of live retailers include smoothies from Nekter Juice Bar, salad from MAD Greens,sushi from Tokyo Joe’s, and crunchy shiitake mushroom chips from Popadelics. During the live pilot, customers from participating retailers are able to order drone delivery for just $3, and experience delivery times averaging under 4 minutes.
This pre-seed will fund product development with the goal of achieving Level 4 autonomy for Flyby’s flight systems, which currently perform at Level 3. At Level 4 autonomy, drones operate without any human intervention throughout the delivery process, but allow a pilot in a remote command center the option to manually override in rare circumstances.
