Why we invested in Okulo Aerospace
Okulo Aerospace
Okulo Aerospace is building cutting-edge clean energy powered Unmanned Aerial vehicles (UAVs). Their UAVs can be used for unhindered continuous monitoring of large industrial projects such as mining fields, solar power plants, wind power projects, wildlife conservation & large parcels of land and water spread across hundreds of kilometres i.e ports, defence, oil and gas transmission pipelines, as well as renewable energy parks.
Okulo powers their UAVs using solar power with a vision of building long endurance drones that could perpetually stay in-flight. This has the potential to become pseudo satellites in the long term with applications in communications apart from infrastructure monitoring.
Founder
Dr. Parithi Govindraju: Parithi is a Ph.D in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Purdue University. Parithi comes with strong experience in designing innovative aircraft systems considering design constraints and performance requirements. He has been working on Okulo Aerospace for the last 3 years.
Okulo’s USP
- Unlimited endurance like satellites,
- Provide higher resolution imagery,
- Available on-demand,
- Rapidly deployable like an aircraft, and
- Capable with multiple payload reconfiguration capabilities.
Okulo Aerospace provides clients with geospatial data through its high powered sensors and AI platform using advance analytics by which customers can foresee future capability gaps and requirements to solve present-day critical challenges.
Our Thesis
- Drones are used in Asset Management due to cost effectiveness, easily manoeuvrable, accurate image capturing through infrared cameras, data analysis through AI/ML. When used, it can identify defects and predict defects such as corrosion, coating failures and other structural damages. Due to this reason Oil & Gas co. are heavily dependent to monitor their onshore and offshore pipelines, this eventually costs them approximately close to $50 Billion worldwide.
- The government is promoting indigenous technological solutions through various initiatives and making a strategic move towards adopting smart technology for advance surveillance and gathering of information systems.
- Unmanned Aerial Vehicle inspection takes over the conventional helicopter inspection and can be used across different verticals, which usually are spread across acres of land and very heavily capitalised when compared to conventional way ie Helicopters & Satellite.
- Huge data lakes are the most crucial asset of any business today, which are provided through Surveillance/Monitoring-as-a-Service business model. Therefore providing an asset light solution for the subscriber/customer resulting in high adaptability for the product.
- The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are basically floating base stations in the sky, providing and transferring data which make industries more efficient in terms of operation. Some of the industries which are positively impacted are as follows: Supply chain management: For tracking the movement of goods & Inventory management. Telecommunication Industry: By increasing bandwidth and expanding coverage. Automotive / City Planning: Help in mapping cities and areas to help in city planning and navigation. Gaming Industry: Low latency provides efficient communication and better connectivity between servers.
These factors support Okulo Aerospace as a strong contender in the Indian UAV ecosystem
Okulo Aerospace is at the intersection of cost efficient UAVs which have better monitoring capabilities than drones and clean energy powered pseudo-satellites.
