Kittyhawk rebranding: the UTM startup is now called Aloft

Kittyhawk, the San Francisco-based drone startup working on building airspace management software, just underwent a major rebranding. The old name is no more; as of a June 2021 Kittyhawk rebranding, you can now refer to the company as Aloft.

The company formerly known as Kittyhawk had its humble beginnings with a mostly hobby-pilot-focused app for tracking flights. But the company has grown to become a fairly significant name in the drone industry, participating in multiple projects with big players like NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration.

And now, Kittyhawk’s new name is Aloft.

“Aloft represents the core company mission of powering and enabling safe and compliant drone flights through a powerful combination of enterprise UTM applications, security and compliance solutions and AI,” according to a prepared statement from the company.

Kittyhawk’s domain, then “Kittyhawk.io”, was registered on Dec. 17, 2014, the 111th anniversary of the Wright Brothers’ first flight (that domain now redirects to the new “aloft.ai” domain. The company really launched in 2015 a post-flight logging utility. In the following years, Kittyhawk expanded into more aspects of operations, including mission planning, pre-flight checklists, ability to see live flight traffic and flight logging. In 2018, the company expanded dramatically with the launch of its now-patented Dynamic Airspace platform, which played an interesting role in remote identification of drones.

These days, Aloft (the company formerly known as Kittyhawk) is a big player in the UTM (short for Unmanned Aircraft System Traffic Management) space, which is basically air traffic control for drones. The company is the largest UTM network of airspace users and stakeholders, and is behind more than 50% of all LAANC airspace authorizations (that’s the primary system drone pilots need to go through to legally fly in controlled airspace).

And Aloft is still the company behind the FAA’s B4UFLY app, a job it took over a few years back to give the lagging app a much-needed update.

What do you think about the Kittyhawk rebrand? Do you like the new Aloft name?