Blackbird joins $18m round for Australia's Propeller
Blackbird Ventures has joined a A$26 million ($18.3 million) round for Propeller Aero, an Australian data analytics provider focused on drone surveying at industrial worksites.
Existing investors Sequoia Capital China and US-based firms Accel Partners and Costanoa Ventures also participated. It follows a $10 million Series A round in 2018 that featured all four investors as well as Australian incubator Cicada Innovation and Startmate, an accelerator affiliated with Blackbird. The company has raised about $32 million to date, including a seed-stage contribution from Chinese drone giant DJI.
Founded in 2014, Propeller offers 3D imaging tools to help clients improve management of industrial worksites, especially mines and construction projects. The technology, which is operable on-site via tablet, aims to minimize disputes and mistakes, while lowering reporting overheads. Propeller claims its systems are used by more than 2,700 companies in 120 countries, and business is said to have picked up amid COVID-19 shutdowns.
The fresh capital will be used in part to advance a newly launched product called DirtMate that automates the data collection process and allows 3D maps to be created in real-time instead of a typical time lag of 12-plus hours. The product combines 4G, internet-of-things and satellite navigation technologies into a solar-powered interface unit able to track changes in both the surface areas of worksites and the operational status of equipment.
“DirtMate takes hardware and puts it on each machine, which lets us figure out the position of GPS devices and the machines as they move, and [from this], we can build a map in real-time," Rory San Miguel, Propeller’s co-founder and CEO told The Australian Financial Review. "We've been working on it in stealth for two years now since July 2018. For me it was the obvious thing to do, rather than chasing better drone maps.”
Blackbird raised A$261 million for its most recent fund in 2018 with a strong focus on helping local start-ups scale globally. The venture capital firm sees the most potential for this in enterprise-facing software-as-a-service (SaaS) models and bottom-up marketing strategies such as search engine optimization, word-of-mouth, and viral features built into digital products. Enterprise SaaS represents about 60% of the Blackbird portfolio.
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