Wonder Robotics, a technology company focusing in commercial drone autonomous flying and landing, announced the completion of a $4 million funding round headed by Elron Ventures in collaboration with Besadno Investment Group. The cash will be used to expand operations and marketing initiatives, as well as to develop technology for new applications.
The largest industry players are vigorously promoting safe autonomous operation as a market facilitator and at the heart of the quickly evolving drone regulation. Currently, the technology for operating drones beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) is insufficient, limiting the potential to deliver safe, autonomous drone flights and making drone commercialization costly and unscalable. As a result, Wonder Robotics created the “WonderLand” system for perfect autonomous landings, which can be put on any drone. Real-time clearance of landing zones permits emergency autonomous contingency landings in unprepared, unexplored, and unsupervised sites.
The smart safety layer from Wonder Robotics combines vertical awareness and robust precision landing, allowing drone safety to extend beyond the operator/mission manager’s visual line of sight. This can prevent collisions with people and natural and manmade obstructions such as trees, cables, buildings, and other dynamic environmental elements in urban situations.
“We are thrilled to take part in the drone revolution, by partnering with major industry players leveraging on our technology to launch their commercial multi-drone operations,” said Idan Shimon, co-founder, and CEO of Wonder Robotics. “Since raising the seed round, we have partnered with Spright, Air Methods’ new drone division, helping it realize its mission to improve access to urgently needed medical supplies for healthcare providers.”
Wonder Robotics’ founding team are true industry experts and have the knowledge and technical expertise needed to enable a market waiting to take off, and establish WonderLand as an industry standard,” said Lauren Duke, Vice President of Business Development at Elron Ventures.
“Our investment in Wonder Robotics is perfectly aligned to our strategy of investing in domains where we can provide added value, by leveraging on our strategic partnership with Rafael and its validation platform for deep-tech ventures,” added Kobi Katz, Partner, and CTO at Elron Ventures and former VP and CIO at Rafael.
