Delft, the Netherlands-based Fusion Engineering, a startup that claims to be developing the most reliable, flexible, and easy-to-use flight controller for any type of multirotor drone, announced that it has raised €700K in its pre-Seed round of funding.
The capital will allow the startup to complete its prototype flight controller for the commercial drone industry, validate it with selected development partners, and launch it commercially.
Investors in this round
Graduate Entrepreneur co-invested in the funding round together with a consortium of angel investors.
Founder and CEO of Fusion Engineering, Robert Crone, says, “‘Thanks to Graduate, the ball started rolling in terms of fundraising, they were the first investor to commit and through them, we got to know our lead investor. Furthermore, we are matched with a mentor within the Graduate’s network who is exactly one year ahead with his startup. We meet with him weekly and thanks to his young entrepreneurial experience, we get useful tips and the guidance we need in the current phase of Fusion Engineering.”
Discovering the next step in flight-control technology
Fusion Engineering was founded in 2017 by TU Delft alumni Robert Crone (Aerospace Engineering) and Mara Bos (Computer Science). The startup’s vision is to make drone flight so safe and reliable that it can be seamlessly integrated into anyone’s daily life.
The company says it started from the ground up, developing its own flexible and reliable software platform. On top of this platform, the startup has built flight control algorithms to ensure more accurate positioning, disturbance rejection, and fault tolerance.
Control technologies implemented are UKF, which combines all available sensors such as position, orientation, and velocity data to make a possible estimation of the current state of the drone, and INDI, which controls the propellers to make the drone fly.
Robert Crone says, “While drone hardware has come a long way over the past decades, we realised that software development has been lagging. That’s why we are developing drone flight control systems from scratch. With our flight controller, drone flights will become much safer and more reliable, meaning they can be certified to fly above urban areas and be able to withstand adverse environmental conditions offshore. By focusing on meeting the new EU regulation at the highest level, we allow all types of drone applications to scale.”
Fusion Engineering says that if left to it, it will be possible to deliver pizza at the doorstep or maintain rotor blades of wind turbines remotely by using drones in the near future. The company says that the challenge to be able to legitimate conduct these drone flights is to develop the right flight controller.
The Fusion Reflex
Fusion Engineering claims that the first version of its flight controller, the Fusion Reflex, is the key to a new generation of drone flights. The company has designed it with reliability and flexibility in mind, as the Fusion Reflex is adaptable for any type of multirotor drone. It can be used for drone manufacturers that work on drone applications for the future.
Earlier this year, the prototype flight controller showed some promising performances, according to Fusion Engineering. During a test, the startup’s flight controller proved against its nearest competitor that the Fusion Reflex control system caused seven times less disruption to the test drone’s flight path from wind gusts.
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