Autonomous indoor inspection drone startup Flyability SA today said it has raised $11 million in new funding to increase production, expand its partner network and hike increase research and development.

The Series B round was co-led by ETF Partners and Swisscom Ventures with Dow Chemical Co., GoBeyond and MKS (Switzerland) SA also participating.

Founded in 2014, Flyability is designing autonomous drones that can be used for visual inspections of confined spaces. Targeted at disrupting how visual inspection is performed in power generation, oil and gas, mining, chemical and maritime infrastructures, as well as in public safety and search and rescue, the drones replace the need for humans to inspect hazardous environments, reducing downtime and inspection costs.

Even if the idea may sound technical to some, the concept is remarkably simple. When equipment or an area requires inspection, a company sends in a Flyability drone instead of a human, the drone being both smaller than a human and unaffected by potential exposure to toxic chemicals or other hazards.

“Flyability’s unique collision-tolerant design allows its Elios UAV to safely and efficiently inspect confined areas often too dangerous for inspection crews to enter,” a spokesperson for the company told SiliconANGLE. “With its drone inspection solutions quickly finding adoption for diverse industrial inspection applications, Flyability is looking to leverage this continued investment to expand its autonomy and spatial awareness capabilities of its Elios platform with the ultimate aim of letting inspectors and surveyors focus on the data insights while the rest of the process happens automatically.”

The company claims to be the market leader in industrial indoor drones, with more than 350 customers and more than 500 drones in the field that have already undertaken thousands of flight hours.

Moving forward, Flyability wants to take its drones to the next level, including indoor 3-D mapping, fully autonomous navigation and predictive asset maintenance, the latter where a drone could deploy by itself when required.

Including the new funding, Flyability has raised $17.8 million to date.

Photo: Flyability