Kejora, InterVest lead $30m Series B for Malaysia's Aerodyne

Malaysian VCs Intres Capital Partners and VentureTech also participated, as did US-based 500 Startups and China’s Gobi Ventures. The investment is being called a first close for the Series B. It follows an investment of undisclosed size earlier this year from Japan’s Drone Fund.

Kejora and InterVest jointly manage the Kejora-InterVest Star Southeast Asia Growth Fund, which closed in May at $100 million and makes deployments in a range of $5-10 million. The two investors have not specified that this vehicle was used for the Aerodyne investment.

Aerodyne provides artificial intelligence (AI) systems to the enterprise drone sector for use in large-scale data capture and analytics. It claims to have completed 60,000 flight operations, inspected 250,000 assets, and surveyed in 55,000 kilometers of power infrastructure across 25 countries.

Focus sectors include oil and gas, renewables, telecoms, construction, agriculture, and infrastructure. The fresh capital will be used to expand the current team of 320 drone experts, advance various R&D projects, and pursue expansions in Japan, India, the US, and the Middle East.

“As a strategic impact investor, our investment is centered on the socioeconomic footprint and commercial strength of Aerodyne’s business as well as the emerging industry it is in,” Norida Abd Rahman, a managing director at VentureTech, said in a statement. “VentureTech sees the drone industry as a platform industry with high potential to produce spillover effect to the local economy such as the creation of high-skilled employment, intensifying R&D activities, and increasing overall high-value economic activities.”

The integration of AI-related technologies into industrial-use drones is expected to become an increasingly attractive investment area as device-level processing capacity and computer vision systems improve.

Recent venture capital activity in this space includes an $11 million round for China and US-based Clobotics, a company that equips drones for detecting damage on renewable wind power installations. Images are transmitted in real-time to investigate issues such as weakened or broken turbine blades.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Industrials
• Technology
• Early-stage
• Malaysia
• Kejora Ventures
• InterVest
• 500 Startups
• Gobi Partners
• artificial intelligence
• energy