Building a Cutting Edge Drone Technology Company: Tom Walker, CEO of DroneUp (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Are you then pivoting the business largely into the delivery sector?

Tom Walker: We’re splitting the company into two. There are so many opportunities in the services side. Our growth is about equal in terms of the delivery and the growth of the services. We had been seeing 900% growth on the services side. It’s a viable business. Because we do that with independent contractors, we can grow that business without having to grow our overhead quite as much.

From Solo Techie Entrepreneur to High Growth, Profitable Enterprise AI Success Story: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. In all the different use cases that you have applied Findability, what are some of the most powerful use cases that warrant productization as solutions?

Anand Mahurkar: Post-pandemic, we are seeing self-reliance on multiple business processes. One is the supply chain because of the disruption in the market by the pandemic. We have built an AI best practice framework called CUPP – Collection, Unification, Processing, and Presentation. Unfortunately, all the AI companies just focus on the processing part. The collection and unification of the data are very powerful.

Building a Cutting Edge Drone Technology Company: Tom Walker, CEO of DroneUp (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you revenue-wise? $20 million?

Tom Walker: We’ll do more than that this year. To put it in perspective, we were 12 full-time people in January of 2021. Now we have 25,000 drone operators. We are 205 full-time employees. By the end of this year, we’ll be at a little over 650.

Sramana Mitra: My next question is business structuring. This is hypergrowth. What kind of a business are you building? How much of your business is software products? How much of it is services? How much of it is human services?

From Solo Techie Entrepreneur to High Growth, Profitable Enterprise AI Success Story: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What year did you get funding?

Anand Mahurkar: Late 2017.

Sramana Mitra: This was after how long from founding?

Anand Mahurkar: About six years.

Sramana Mitra: You had substantial revenue already?

Building a Cutting Edge Drone Technology Company: Tom Walker, CEO of DroneUp (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Did you learn that there was this segment that has this need in the shipping segment?

Tom Walker: Port and port security. The problem at that time was there were so many industries that we knew could use it. I’ll give you an example from the insurance industry. A storm comes through an area and they’re sending inspectors to walk around and assess the damage. We knew that we could put a drone out and capture all of this in high resolution. We just knew the insurance industry was going to embrace us.

From Solo Techie Entrepreneur to High Growth, Profitable Enterprise AI Success Story: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In launching this company, did you bootstrap? How did you get the company off the ground?

Anand Mahurkar: It was bootstrapped. I had a $10,000 bank account. Probably we are the only enterprise AI company that is profitable and revenue-making with no debt. I bootstrapped all these years. I got my first customer six months after starting the business.

Sramana Mitra: You wrote the software and you sold the software?

Building a Cutting Edge Drone Technology Company: Tom Walker, CEO of DroneUp (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us how the side project turned into a business.

Tom Walker: I’ll tell you a funny story along the way. We had some people join the organization as volunteers. A retired CIO from a large company came on board. We were trying to build something, but we didn’t know what it was. We called it DART – Drone-Assisted Response Team. We were going to launch on Monday.

From Solo Techie Entrepreneur to High Growth, Profitable Enterprise AI Success Story: Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar (Part 1)

I always love doing stories of my readers. Anand has been following the blog since 2010. He has built a terrific, fundamentals-focused AI company. And I am thrilled.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, and raised, and in what kind of background?