West Lafayette startup marks growth with drone sensing tech
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The CEO of a West Lafayette-based ag-tech startup says the company continues to see growth after a U.S. Department of Energy grant expired.
GRYFN, which uses technology developed at Purdue University, has created a drone-based, research-grade remote sensing platform.
But Matt Bechdol says while the company continues to focus on agriculture as its base, the platform is being expanded for use in natural resources, forestry and oceanic environments.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, Bechdol said the company has seen significant growth after receiving a $2.25 million grant from the DOE in 2019.
“That grant ended about a year and a half ago, and since we’ve grown tremendously,” he said. “We have essentially earned at least 150% of the original grant value back in commercial sales. We have maintained and protected equity for the founders, and so we are out of that grant phase and very much in the commercial phase of selling to customers.”
GRYFN’s heavy-lift drone platform consists of three main components. The first is visual with a camera mounted on the drone. The second is LiDAR, or light detection and ranging, which uses lasers to create an image of three dimensional space. The third is hyperspectral, which allows for imaging at a greater level than the human eye.
The drones can be flown over crops to collect data that allows farmers and plant breeders the ability to make decisions on addressing any issues with their crops more efficiently.
“What we’ve been able to do is streamline the ease of use and that product experience, so that our customers that used to have this expectation that a team would go to the field would be very hard now can send out one person, collect the data they need, and really focus on outcomes,” Bechdol said. “So we like to say that we shorten the gap between acquisition and analysis, so that those users can get to do what they do best.”
In addition to simply selling the platform to customers, about a quarter of GRYFN’s business is in professional services, where someone from the company will use a drone to collect data for a customer that may not have a qualified drone pilot.
Bechdol said while agriculture is where the company worked to prove the technology, he knew further success would come from other areas. GRYFN is now starting to move into those other markets.
“We’re starting to be used for forestry applications in Arizona later this year. We are starting to do defense intelligence type of applications, USDA and other types of things like range land management. We leased a platform this year on the East Coast for oceanography and coastal studies.”
The company’s platform, Bechdol said, could also be used in mining operations in the western part of the country.
GRYN currently has five employees and plans to add another this year. Bechdol said the company has done a good job of growing in a bootstrap manner without additional fundraising simply through product sales.
The company more than doubled its revenue in 2022. Bechdol said he doesn’t expect to double revenue again this year, but they are starting to see sales pick back up as the end of the year draws near.
“I think by the end of 2024, we’re going to be hitting our revenue targets that we set three, four years ago that we needed to be at to be self sustaining and continue that growth trajectory,” he said.
Looking ahead, Bechdol said they are looking to streamline the data collection process and shift the technology as needed. On a more long-term basis, he said company will have a growing focus on creating a solution to help customers distribute the information they’ve collected with the drone platform.
“There’s this expectation that science and research has to be hard or it’s not high quality,” he said. “And we just don’t believe that. We believe that researchers can get a one plus one [equals] three outcome if you streamline that experience for them.”