Six months after closing on a $750,000 financing round, the PrecisionHawk veterans behind Raleigh startup Cloneable say they’re ready to emerge from stealth mode.
In May, co-founder Lia Reich said the concept isn’t focused on drones, but instead how to develop apps without code. But over the months, the idea has evolved. Today, Cloneable is billed as a no-code platform to build and deploy AI, machine learning and computer vision applications to devices such as tablets, robots and, yes, drones.
Cloneable’s founders describe it as “bringing the decision-making expertise to the machine.”
The new company is already working with Fortune 500 partners on applications such as infrastructure inspection and crop modeling.
CEO Patrick Lohman said early interest came with firms looking to leverage smart apps in the field.
“We’ve also got a lot of pick up from some of the chipmakers on how this is going to be implemented back into the IoT devices to make them smarter as well,” Lohman said in an interview Wednesday.
The idea came out of their experiences at PrecisionHawk, Lohman said.
“We went 10 years and drones still didn’t know why they were collecting photos or data in general, so we kind of thought through how we needed a software platform to be able to really push a lot of this intelligence, not only into the drones, but really any device,” Lohman said.
While the company still has some runway from the $750,000 it raised earlier this year, the four-person team is starting to raise its next seed round, Lohman said.
Lohman and Reich are joined in the startup by Tyler Collins, also formerly of PrecisionHawk. The firm also added an engineer outside of the PrecisionHawk bubble earlier this year.
PrecisionHawk, a Raleigh drone developer, was acquired by geospatial data firm Field Group. Both Lohman and Collins moved to Raleigh from Indiana with PrecisionHawk. Lohman said it’s become home and they never considered starting Cloneable anywhere else.
