Indiana drone company sees growth with new platform
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A drone technology startup born out of Purdue University is marking continued growth with the launch of a new outdoor unmanned aircraft system designed for use by first responders and search-and-rescue teams.
Uniform Sierra Aerospace, founded by three Purdue alumni, is capitalizing on a recently-passed law preventing the use of federal grant money for the purchase of Chinese-built drone equipment.
“It’s been great for us because we are offering the lowest cost or one of the lowest cost, U.S.-built alternatives to these Chinese products,” co-founder Duncan Mulgrew said. “And not only that, but they’re better for [the customers’] specific use case.”
The company’s initial tactical drone, known as the Arrowhead system, was developed for indoor use to help first responders gather information from situations that could be dangerous, such as SWAT standoffs, collapsed buildings and house fires.
“It’s unique in that it can enter buildings and operate inside of buildings, without GPS and in difficult radio environments, and that’s designed to take people out of harm’s way,” Mulgrew said. “Since we started selling that and kind of developing it, we got a bunch of our customers to come back and ask us to do a similar approach to outdoor drones.”
Because of the increase in demand for U.S.-built drones, Uniform Sierra has seen big growth as a young startup, doubling its team to 10 employees and moving into a larger production facility just north of Purdue’s West Lafayette campus.
“We can build the aircraft a lot faster. We did a lot of R&D in late 2023 to kind of further improve Arrowhead as the core initial product, which has better video, better connectivity, flies longer; it’s just a better system overall. And on top of that, we’ve made it a lot easier to manufacture, leads to lower costs for the customer.”
Mulgrew said when the company was formed, there was no way they could compete in the outdoor with the capabilities and prices that Chinese companies had when it came to outdoor drones.
But Uniform Sierra, over the last year, was able to secure the engineering talent, funding and equipment to build a competitive product. Combined with the ban on Chinese-built products, the company came into a “perfect storm” to create what it calls the Panther system.
“We found some good camera technology that worked really well that could kind of go toe-to-toe with the Chinese system, and that system started to get banned. Then, we had a bunch of people come to us asking for alternatives for it,” Mulgrew said.
The company says Panther features a 40x zoom camera and a thermal camera. It can fly for more than 45 minutes and cruise at 50 miles per hour in certain conditions.
A key component to the new system, Mulgrew said, is that it can fly in higher winds than other unmanned aerial systems and is waterproofed so that it can fly in rain and snow.
“The primary challenge of outdoor operations is being able to operate no matter the weather conditions at the time,” Mulgrew said. “In the event of a missing person case that requires search and rescue, our users can’t afford to ground their drone fleet if it’s windy or raining.”
Plus, an added benefit, according to Mulgrew, is that the Panther and Arrowhead systems are standardized so users can operate both without different types of training.
Mulgrew and his co-founders, Jeremy Frederick and Trevor Redpath, launched the company with bootstrapped funding, and received an $80,000 seed investment from the Elevate Nexus pitch competition in 2022, as well as $100,000 from the Purdue Innovates Startup Foundry’s Black and Gold Awards pitch competition in 2023.
But the company last year also looked toward venture capital, raising nearly $500,000 in a pre-seed round.
“That’s been a huge help in terms of being able to do the R&D at a higher level, produce the drones faster, and kind of get the facilities set up,” Mulgrew said. “We wanted to be conscious about not taking too much venture capital and kind of becoming dependent on that. So, we’re still very heavily sales based heavily revenue based.”
Mulgrew said his long-term goal is to become a one-stop shop for law enforcement and first responders to get quality drones at low cost, but also moving into other verticals, including the energy and transportation industries.