A strange byproduct of writing about robots all the time is getting strange bits of insight into jobs you’d never really considered. Like, it makes sense, certainly, that it’s someone’s job to inspect and clean wind turbines, but the thought had never really crossed my mind. Turns out it’s a fairly harrowing job, as these things go, requiring people to dangle high in the air to get a closer look at the blades.
Y Combinator-backed Aerones was founded with the mission of using drones to get human workers out of harm’s way. The solution made sense on the face of it. It’s among the more compelling uses I’ve seen for those sorts of massive industrial devices. In 2020, however, the company changed approaches, moving from drones to robots.
Seems the new approach is gaining some traction. Today the Latvian startup announced a $9 million seed round, led by Future Positive Capital and Change Ventures. That joins an already announced $3.6 million pre-seed. The firm says it’s currently working with 9/10 of the largest wind companies, including names like GE and Siemens Gamesa, having inspected around 3,000 turbines in all. That’s spread out across 17 countries, largely in Europe and North and South America.
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