UAV Coach Interviews George Mathew, CEO of Kespry

Drone News · March 1, 2017

Kespry is well known in the drone industry for its end-to-end commercial solutions, and is already a huge player when it comes to enterprise applications for drones in surveying, mapping, construction, and other industrial areas. With the recent release of the Kespry 2, and a new CEO, Kespry continues to solidify its position in the industry.

We asked Kespry’s new CEO George Mathew for a few minutes of his time to pick his brain about the future of the industry, recent Kespry news, and what he loves about drones (among other topics).

About Kespry

Based in Menlo Park, CA, Kespry is one of the leading aerial intelligence platform providers, working to transform how business insights are captured, analyzed, and shared in various types of organizations. Kespry provides an end-to-end solution, developing drone hardware, software, and cloud services that support industry needs from field to finish. Kespry supports customers in North America, Europe, and Australia. In North America, three of the top five construction materials firms and the top five aggregate firms currently use the Kespry system.

About CEO George Mathew

Before joining Kespry in January, 2017, George Mathew was the president and chief operating officer of Alteryx, a self-service analytics software provider. While at Alteryx he led the company through exponential growth in the self-service analytics market by focusing on product innovation and customer success. With 20 years of experience at growth-oriented technology startups as well as category leading software providers such as salesforce.com and SAP, Mathew has held a wide range of senior leadership positions, from driving company strategy to leading product management, development, sales and marketing teams. This is his first position in the drone industry.

George Mathew, CEO of Kespry

“This market is a creation event that is underway that will result in over $100B new market opportunity this coming decade.”

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Begin Interview:

UAV Coach: Describe what Kespry does in one short sentence.

George Mathew: Kespry is the leading aerial intelligence platform for delivering a complete, end-to-end, app-driven experience to the Industrial market.

UAV Coach: We know you have a strong background in data analytics from your work at Alteryx, and of course Kespry Cloud collects and analyzes aerial data. What direction would you like to see Kespry go in terms of collecting, analyzing, and making data usable for commercial customers? That is, what is your overall vision for Kespry Cloud?

George Mathew: Kespry is focused on unlocking the potential on new analytical applications that can be delivered from the data our industrial drones are generating. This capability of providing an end-to-end platform is quite unique in the industry as it starts with fully autonomous capture through to a complete application experience delivered in Kespry Cloud. The natural expansion of Kespry Cloud will be to deploy and scale applications to our Industrial customers.

UAV Coach: What is unique about the Kespry Drone 2? Are there new applications it will enable, and/or how does it improve work on existing applications?

George Mathew: The Kespry Drone 2.0 is a lighter-weight version of the previous model that flies twice as long, covers twice the ground area and has twice the wind resilience. This is possible because of a new airframe, battery, and flight system improvements.

UAV Coach: Are there new markets and applications you want to push into in 2017?

George Mathew: The primary industry expansion focus is on Insurance and the AEC sectors to complement Kespry’s strength in the aggregates market.

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UAV Coach: Kespry does many different things in the drone industry, which means some people may not fully be aware of all your impressive work. Is there anything Kespry does that you feel like some people may not know, but you want to make sure they do?

George Mathew: Kespry differentiates itself in delivering Autonomy, AI, and Applications for the Industrial use-cases that we serve. In delivering a turn-key solution, we will continue to deliver a world-class experience that automates current drone-based data collection, cutting workflows from days to minutes.

UAV Coach: What separates you from other companies in your space?

George Mathew: Besides revenue? Focus and completeness of solution.

UAV Coach: What do you love about drones?

George Mathew: Drones are incredible machines that not only improve human productivity but open up entirely new uses that were previous far too cost prohibitive and/or too much of a safety risk.

UAV Coach: What in the drone industry is just a fad and won’t last?

George Mathew: I may be biased being a more recent CEO in the drone industry, but this market is a creation event that is underway that will result in over $100B new market opportunity this coming decade.

UAV Coach: What drone(s) do you fly?

George Mathew: Kespry 2s, but of course!

The Kespry 2.0

UAV Coach: What are your predictions for the drone industry? Please feel free to answer at length (what you see way down the road, what you see for next year, where you see regulations headed in the U.S. and abroad, new applications, etc.).

George Mathew: The biggest thing is the expansion/differentiation in the Commercial drone market where the market opportunity can and will be bigger than the consumer drone market. The Kespry system has been autonomous and a complete end-to-end solution that makes it easy to capture, process and use field information since it first launched in 2013. We’re only seeing appetite for this kind of business-results focused solution increase. We know it’s a very realistic growth path because we’re already delivering it in a number of industries with great results for our customers. The current landscape is filled with broken toys that put the responsibility of getting all the pieces you need working together on the user. Truly great technology is almost invisible, as it makes achieving your goal feel simple. The Kespry team cares deeply about removing as much friction as possible from capturing, using, and getting value from your data. As the industry matures and expectations rise, we believe more professionals will be drawn by end-to-end solutions such as Kespry that remove distractions and allow them to focus on creating fresh value for their business. Most of the industry growth to date has been driven by optical sensors which, from an application development perspective, is still in its infancy. Many new sensor types are already coming to market but we believe the main focus will remain on optical sensors in 2017, and how they can be used with AI applications and machine learning to accelerate corporate performance. Beyond that, we see further growth of the UAV industry into the mainstream that will fuel some of the transformational changes we’re seeing in how we think about work and deliver value (classic blue collar roles as well as white collar).

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Below are some images from Kespry’s mapping and analytics platform showing various models created for mining sites based on information gathered via drone.