Get to know this local startup which provides mapping service 10 times better than Google Earth

Developing unmanned aerial vehicles is its major thrust.

Singapore Business Review spotted founders of an interesting local startup, Avetics, which started operation last year. Avetics develop Unmanned aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for non-military purpose. Founders Zhang Weiliang & Joshua Chao claims that their first product, the Falcon, can stay airborne for 1 hour and produce maps of 10x better resolution than Google Earth.

“ We took about 1 year and countless hours of test flights to refine this method and we are now on par with our competitors,” said Weiliang.

 Besides providing mapping service, Weilang said that Avetics also custom develop UAVs together with our customers.

When asked what makes their company promising, here are a few trends that they claim are in their favour:

Rising demand for UAV for non-military use. Forestry researchers are using it to photograph hard to reach places and plantation owners are beginning to see it as a tool for land management. We provide a low cost (up to 50% cheaper than our European competitors) solution to fulfill this need. Moreover proximity of Singapore to countries with large land mass like Indonesia makes it easier to penetrate the market.

We are actively building up partnerships with 3 types of companies in Singapore. We are in talks with resellers of surveying equipment with presence in Indonesia. We believe they can help us create a beach head into this new market. We believe that our model of low cost equipment coupled with online data processing in Singapore will be a good value proposition for our potential customers. Already, a major Japanese construction company and Indonesian equipment seller has expressed strong interest in being our resellers/franchisee.

We actively engage the Singapore government to adopt new projects. We presently have a on going trial with SLA to provide high resolution maps for monitoring. We are also in constant talks with CAAS for air rights clearance. My view is that we can expand to Southeast Asia quickly and Singapore will provide us with good test bed for new UAV concepts.

We are also talking to research institutes to establish key technologies in the field of image analytics. When prices of high resolution imagery comes down, there will be an explosion in the amount of data generated. Presently there are not enough automated image analytics out there that can fulfill this on coming demand. We intend to develop our own in house capability. In the end, developing UAV is not an end in itself but merely a means for us to acquire high resolution images economically.

COMPANY PROFILE

Name of the company: Avetics Pte Ltd
Founder/Founders: Zhang Weiliang & Joshua Chao
Website: www.avetics.com
Major Investors: Looking to close first round of investment soon
Total funding at hand: 55k (prize money + government grants)
Target fund: 400k
Source of funding: Private investors
Start of operation: April 2011


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