Swiss drone company moves its North American headquarters to Raleigh

North Carolina's long claimed the honor of being first in flight, but local leaders are hoping a corporate relocation goes a ways toward eventually making it first in drones.

Drone maker senseFly moved its North American hub to Raleigh this week, trading its home in downtown Washington, D.C., for new quarters near Fuquay-Varina.

A move had been in the works for a year or two because senseFly wanted to get out from under the security-driven restrictions on flying drones that go with life in downtown Washington.

The 9-year-old company settled on Raleigh so it can capitalize on the talent that's emerging from N.C. State University, Duke University and UNC-Chapel Hill, company officials said, name-checking the region's large research schools specifically.

Washington was "a great place for us to start" while the Federal Aviation Administration was working on its first rules for drones, but now "what we need to be focusing on is serving our customers to the best of our ability," senseFly spokeswoman Jessica Sader said.

"The main attraction is the talent pool," she added. "We're always looking for the brightest and best people to join our team, and we're lucky now to be in an area where there's a lot of people who could potentially join the team."

Local leaders didn't put any business incentives on the table to land the company, but they made sure to roll out the red carpet in every other way.

SenseFly joined the N.C. State-based NextGen Air Transportation Consortium and also secured a memorandum of understanding with the university that addresses facility sharing, the hiring of interns and cooperation with the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, said Kyle Snyder, the consortium's director.

"Having that sort of partnership was really critical for us," Sader said, pointing to the cooperation senseFly got from Snyder's group and Wake County's economic development office.

SenseFly makes a family of fixed-wing drones it calls the eBee, and a quadricopter called the albris. They're geared for professional use in mapping, survey work and other applications, not the consumer market.

It's "not a large company, but a proven company and in today's drone world, that's a rare commodity," Snyder said. "Companies that have been doing this as long as they have have a core technology base and a customer base that allows them to say they're making money, and not all venture [capital] money. We're super-excited to have them here."

SenseFly is headquartered in Switzerland and, since 2012, has been part of a larger French outfit called the Parrot Group that also develops drones and the software to run them. The combined firm turned a profit of 22.3 million euros in 2017, the equivalent of $25.8 million.

Commercial-market sales accounted for 41.6 million euros of Parrot's 151.9 million in revenues last year, according to its end-of-year financial report. Those numbers translate into $48.2 million and $175.9 million at current exchange rates.

SenseFly's revenues grew by 44 percent over the year, the report said.

The company's move to Raleigh relocated its North American shipping and logistics, customer services, sales and marketing staff. As of Wednesday, 15 people were employed in the new office, and senseFly was recruiting more. The staff includes three recent hires from this area, Sader said.

Now that it's here, "the goal is to grow this office to fit the needs of our customers," she said. "The more our business grows, the more the operation here will grow."

As it happens, moving to the area brought senseFly closer to one its more prominent customers, Duke's Marine Robotics and Remote Sensing lab. It operates from the Duke Marine Lab in Beaufort and flies an assortment of drones that include some senseFly eBees.

The Marine Robotics lab's director, professor David Johnston, said he and his staff are happy with senseFly's gear because it's "very robust, very efficient and easy to use, and can tolerate the kind of conditions we work in" from the tropics to the poles.

Johnston, recently a featured presenter at a senseFly user conference in Denver, said the company's move to Raleigh "is already spurring further collaboration" between it and the Duke lab.

"This is an opportunity for us to work with the people who are in the industry pipeline, for them to look at how we use the gear, for use to give them feedback and to explore new ways to use the equipment and different sensors as they come out," Johnston said.

"The more we have academics and industry working together, we help each other out," he added.

The move to North Carolina also should help the company develop ties to the state's business sector, Snyder said, naming the survey trade, civil engineering and agriculture as prospective targets for senseFly to work with.

The drone industry in North Carolina already got a boost this spring when the Federal Aviation Administration added the N.C. Department of Transportation to a three-year test program that's supposed to pioneer new drone applications. DOT officials and a group of private companies are trying to set up a system that would allow drones to deliver medical supplies.

It's not clear whether senseFly can join that program, but "at least they'll have the benefit of the lessons learned from the research that comes out of those activities," Snyder said.

Collaboration with N.C. State means the company will have access to the university's Lake Wheeler Road research farm south of Raleigh, a location other members of Snyder's consortium have used for flight testing. Snyder reckons the company will fly drones there to train customers and for post-maintenance checks.

That sort of thing wasn't really possible in Washington because the FAA has long placed tight limits on the use of the airspace above the capital. For obvious security reasons, much of it is a prohibited area for civilian air operations, including drones.

The restrictions are why planes landing at Reagan Washington National Airport often fly a curving approach along the Potomac River instead of the straight-in approach that's customary at most airports. But they're also an impediment to companies like senseFly.

Given the need for the customer-service staff to flight-test drone after repairing them, "it just makes more sense for us to be able to fly out of our back yard," Sader said.

This story was originally published June 20, 2018 at 6:34 PM with the headline "Swiss drone company moves its North American headquarters to Raleigh."