INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Auterion, a startup that offers a drone operating system built on top of the popular P4X open source software, has landed $10 million in
Backing the round is Lakestar, Mosaic Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, and Tectonic Ventures.The young Swiss company says the injection of cash
will be used to work closely with the wider PX4 community to further develop the open source code, and to bring the technology to more
enterprise customers in the form of the Auterion platform.Soft-launched earlier this year, Auterion has created a fully-managed operating
system for commercial drones and in turn wants to help solve the interoperability problem between drones and services in which there is
currently no unifying standard
Getting the industry to come together around a single standard would also help various companies in the drone ecosystem compete better with
DJI, which leads the market by a long stretch.&The commercial drone industry is fragmented,& Auterion co-founder and CEO Kevin Sartori tells
&Satisfying these heterogeneous commercial applications will inevitably demand a broad portfolio of resources and talents to deliver complex
Such complex and complete solutions are difficult for a single vendor to successfully build and deliver
Auterion builds the open infrastructure (operating system) so that suppliers, manufacturers, and service companies can respond the demand in
the market and build their product and services on top of global standards.&A drone operating system runs on the embedded flight controller
and on a Linux computer on board of the vehicle
The flight controller takes care of the flight performance and payloads (position, attitude, camera control) whereas the more performing
Linux computer can run custom third-party apps like obstacle avoidance, flight performance analytics, and take care of data streaming over
Auterion operating system takes care of both and is able to remotely provide software updates to the embedded flight controller and Linux
computer.Meanwhile, to enable the highest possible levels of integration between products, Auterion says it works in close collaboration
with other Dronecode members (the body maintaining open source drone software), including 3D Robotics, Airmap, ARM, Intel, NXP, Sony,
STMicroelectronics, and Trimble
Auterion is also the largest contributor to the PX4 ecosystem.Noteworthy is Auterion other co-founder, Lorenz Meier
He is the creator of the most widely used open source standards in the drone industry (PX4, Pixhawk, MavLink, and QGC) and was named an MIT
Innovator in 2017.&Open source software on its own is difficult to adopt and there no guarantee of functionality,& explains Sartori,
likening Auterion mission to that of Red Hat
&Auterion packages the open source code into a managed and long-time supported distribution that makes it easy to use for enterprises
We also offer all the supporting services (cloud analytics, predictive maintenance, unmanned traffic management) as a turnkey solution&.To
that end, Sartori says Auterion typical customers are drone service providers that buy and maintain a drone fleet to offer services to large
enterprises and Fortune 500 companies, along with large enterprises that want to offer that service internally within a business unit (e.g
utility companies, police etc)
The company also targets drone OEMs that build drones for commercial applications.
