Drones Are Clear for Take Off

The proliferation of drones is a near-term inevitability as the FAA rapidly expands access to beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations and moves toward formalizing Part 108. Historically, every BVLOS flight required a waiver, making large-scale deployment expensive and slow. Under the proposed rules, operators will be able to fly under 400 feet with blanket approvals, reducing regulatory friction and enabling wide-scale, pilotless operations.

In parallel, advances in hardware, edge compute, autonomy, and communications have made self-flying drones affordable and capable of executing complex missions without human intervention.

These shifts are reshaping the industry around a new infrastructure layer for automated flight including digital airspace mapping, routing, fleet orchestration, and compliance systems. Companies like our portfolio company Airspace Link, which provides FAA-certified airspace infrastructure, are becoming foundational to this stack.

As we wrote in our broader sensors thesis: we are excited about low-cost, distributed sensors capturing unique, high-frequency customer data. We believe that drones can become a default data-collection platform across many industries.

Where Drones Are Making the Biggest Impact

1. Inspection of infrastructure and municipal assets. Implementation of drones will reduce labor costs and massively increase frequency and data resolution (e.g. Skydio).
2. Security and emergency response, including drones-as-first-responder networks for police, corporate HQs and other public venues. Our portfolio company Aerodome (acquired by Flock Safety) has demonstrated early demand for this.
3. Delivery and logistics for medical deliveries, industrial spare parts, and consumer goods in rural or congested areas (e.g. Zipline).

Startups We Want to Meet

We’re looking for BVLOS-native platforms where drones serve as part of an end-to-end workflow instead of standalone hardware. We’re especially excited to meet startups building:

1. Vertical applications such as infrastructure inspection, drones-as-first-responders and security, remote region deliveries, and delivery of medical, industrial, and consumer goods.
2. Fleet management and autonomy orchestration including real-time controls, routing, scheduling, incident handling, and multi-vehicle autonomy.
3. Drone communications and cybersecurity such as mesh networks, secure networks, drone identity, and real-time telemetry.
4. Lifecycle management platforms for procurement, diagnostics, predictive maintenance, parts supply chains, and compliance tracking of BVLOS drones.
5. Mission-orchestration workflows for defining missions, automating flight plans, logging compliance, and integrating into enterprise systems.
6. Autonomy support infrastructure like drone-in-a-box systems, autonomous charging, and radar systems and other supporting drone operation infrastructure.

If you are a founder working in the drone space, we'd love to connect: 2048.vc/pitch-us