Raffaello D’Andrea, founder of Kiva Systems and Verity, shares thoughts on what companies need to do to succeed, how drone technology evolves, and what makes Switzerland a great place for drone startups.

Raffaello D’Andrea
Co-founder, Verity

Raffaello D’Andrea is a professor of dynamic systems and control at ETH Zurich. He is a co-founder of Kiva Systems, which was acquired by Amazon, and a founder of Verity.

What are the lessons learned from selling your startup Kiva to Amazon?
Our two main objectives at Kiva were to create a company that brought value to our clients with a disruptive solution and to scale and grow our business as quickly as possible. The key lesson is that if you do those two things right, exit possibilities naturally arise.

Why did you not retire after the sale but found another startup?
I enjoy the act of creation. Universities are a great environment for creating fundamental knowledge and pushing the boundary of what is possible, with impact usually being long term and indirect. A startup, however, allows one to have immediate, direct impact. And of course, a startup is itself an act of creation.

What is the difference between a single consumer drone and a system of drones like Verity?
Verity, like Kiva, creates systems, not individual technologies. At Kiva, we created automated warehouse systems. At Verity, we are creating autonomous indoor drone systems. Our drones are highly optimized for our use cases. For example, a consumer drone’s life may be 100 flight hours (and this is optimistic), while our business model relies on drones that can log thousands of flight hours. As a result, we have a significant amount of IP around ensuring that our drones don’t crash, which in large part is achieved by maintenance on demand. Another major difference is that our drones fly indoors, without GPS, and can do so even in the dark. A third is that there is intelligence not only on our drones, but the systems that coordinate them and extract actionable insights from the information they gather.

How will drones evolve over the next few years?
Drones will continue to get smaller: batteries, computing platforms, sensors, these all continue to get smaller and lighter, more efficient, and more reliable. In addition, algorithms continue to improve. We believe that within 7 years our industrial drones will weigh less than 50 grams and cost less than 200 dollars per flight year to operate.

Switzerland has many successful drone startups. What are the ingredients, for this, and what is needed to make this ecosystem even more important?
All the ingredients are here in Switzerland: world-class talent, a strong focus on making exceptional products, long term thinking, and within the last few years, a real appetite for investing in startups. I think that the main responsibility now lies with the startups themselves, and for them to convert all of these ingredients into global powerhouses.

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