Skye Air Mobility, an Indian drone delivery and logistics firm, plans to launch its first commercial drone delivery project at scale in April, in collaboration with Redcliffe Labs, an Indian diagnostics service provider.
While the two businesses are working on a commercial pilot project, Ankit Kumar, CEO of Skye Air, claimed the future initiative will be the first commercial drone delivery project beyond the testing phase.
Kumar also claimed that the partnership with Redcliffe Labs is the first at this scale in India. “We will begin with select districts, and the first phase of the project will include 1,000 deliveries per month,” he added.
To be clear, this isn’t the first commercial drone delivery initiative in India; numerous other drone delivery companies, like TechEagle, have also completed trial projects. Skye Air, on the other hand, asserts that this is India’s first large-scale commercial drone delivery project, providing businesses with bulk delivery services.
Since September 2021, the business has been conducting commercial drone delivery test programmes in India, claiming to have performed 1,000 deliveries in collaboration with companies such as Flipkart, Blue Dart, Dunzo, and Redcliffe Labs. Skye Air plans to raise its first round of pre-seed funding by the end of March 2022, according to Kumar, in order to build up commercial ventures.
Drone delivery projects in India have been given the green light after the Indian government loosened drone laws in February. The new laws have created larger zones that allow commercial drone operations, and a new digital platform dubbed Digital Sky is being developed for better business cooperation.
Kumar said Skye Air was also working on a larger number of commercial projects at a larger scale, which in turn can help the company offer drone deliveries at lowe costs. “We hope to execute 100,000 drone deliveries in the next one year. Projects at such scale can help our partners reduce the overall delivery cost to one-third of present costs – and even in that, we would have a 40% margin for the same,” Kumar said.
