COVID-19 presents growth opportunity for DroneDeploy, as company names MG Thibaut as CFO, expands to Australia
DroneDeploy has been on a tear in 2020, with huge global growth including the opening of an office in Australia and the appointment of M.G. Thibaut as Chief Financial Officer.
M.G. Thibaut joined DroneDeploy, which is an enterprise-grade drone data platform, in mid-July 2020 as CFO from CRM platform Copper, where she was also CFO. Her 20 years of experience include leadership roles at Ruby Ribbon, Strava, and Yahoo!. She holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford and has an MBA from Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.
Thibaut will be based at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco, but there’s big news happening down under, too. This year, DroneDeploy opened an office in Sydney, Australia, which they say will help the company “meet global demand” and “serve a diverse and increasing group of customers and industries benefiting from drone software around the world.”
Coronavirus has crushed many industries. The unemployment rate in June was at 11.1 percent — down from its peak of 14.7 percent in April but still higher than in any previous period since World War II. The IMF said they expect that the global economy will shrink by 3% this year, which it said would mark the worst decline since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
But the drone industry seems to be largely immune.
“DroneDeploy is growing globally to meet demand, bolstered by recent needs for contactless, automated, and remote work in a range of industries due to the global pandemic,” according to a statement from DroneDeploy.
90% of drone industry professionals saying they intend to
increase spending on drone solutions in 2020, according to DroneDeploy.
DroneDeploy said its customers have now mapped a collective 150 million acres — 1/3 of which occurred in the past 8 months alone. 5 million acres of those acres are in Australia, part of why the company opted to open an office there.
And besides adding new offices and headcount, here’s what’s happening on the product side. As part of what DroneDeploy calls its Summer Product Release.
Among the updates users can expect to see since the DroneDeploy Summer Product Release:
- Automated progress reports
- Custom map layers such as pipeline locations, field boundaries, and property lines
- DroneDeploy Academy Certification
- Integrations with products and features from DroneDeploy partners including Esri integration, Live Stream (announced in spring 2020), LAANC Authorization in Partnership with Airbus UTM and Skydio 2 Integration
DroneDeploy also recently secured SOC 2 Type 1 Certification, which is a U.S. security and availability standard indicating that DroneDeploy is certified to securely manage customer data, and is widely considered to be a minimal requirement for security-conscious businesses when considering a SaaS provider.
All that comes in the wake of DroneDeploy’s $35 million Series D round announced in November 2019, which was led by Bessemer Venture Partners. DroneDeploy’s Series D funding brings the startup’s total funding to $90 million, including another $25 million raised in 2018.