Drone Market Ecosystem – By Chris McCann

Company observations

Commercial

• If you are thinking about starting or going into the commercial drone market, I would pay attention to all of the various sub industries within the commercial market. I pulled all of these from the websites of all of the commercial drone companies, on the markets they said they served.
• Sub industries within Commercial: Agriculture, Construction, Infrastructure, Oil & Gas Utilities, Mining, Inspection, Wildlife, Environment, Humanitarian, Public Safety Mapping, GIS, Surveying, Cinematography, Videography, Advertising, Law Enforcement, and Maritime.

Consumer

• From various estimates I have read it looks like DJI has between a 60% and 70% drone marketshare within the consumer space. DJI was reported to have done around $500M in revenue for 2014 and on track to do $1B in sales this year.
• EDIT- As many people pointed out DJI drones are widely being used in commercial applications and is the top of the list for FAA exemptions. All that being said I still consider DJI to be a consumer centric company, which many enterprise centric companies can leverage for use in commercial applications.

Marketplace

• Skycatch went from a development kit, to adding data capturing, and is now moving into and “aerial maps on demand” marketplace. They are reported to be doing very well, especially in a new market.

Insurance/Education

• Very interesting to see the big players in insurance — AIG and StateFarm — trying out drone insurance. I’d pay attention to Skyward.
• DartDrones is one of the few FAA certified drone flight schools. Depending on the FAA regulations and insurance standards, these types of schools could become important.

OS/Deploy Systems/Data

• DroneDeploy is an operation system for deploying and controlling drones programmatically. I could see them moving into the space Skycatch is in and start providing more of the full drone imaging stack.
• I would expect many more companies in the drone data/imaging space once the commercial drone sector starts to take off. Mavrx, DroneData, and AirFusion are just the beginning.