The Trillion Dollar Drone

Udo Zillmann Managing Partner Daidalos Capital GmbH Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage 36 60325 Frankfurt am Main Germany zillmann@daidalos-capital.de www.daidalos-capital.de

The Trillion Dollar Drone – A Change of Perspective

Daidalos Capital GmbH Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) has long been presented as

a special form of wind energy and was mostly pitched to corporate investors from the energy industry. The con-servative energy industry has met the innovative concept of AWE with limited enthusiasm and a lot of doubts have been raised, especially regarding its technical and legal feasibility. And indeed, AWE has some added technical and legal challenges compared to traditional wind tur-bines.

At the same time the potential of the commercial use of autonomous drones has fascinated the business and tech community, the media and the public. Many technology companies have invested in such commercial drones and this has been widely reported. The most popular exam-ples are the proposed delivery drones developed by Ama-zon and the use of high-flying drones for communication (Facebook and Google). But also hundreds of small drone startups have sprung up. In the perception of the public a large industry of commercial drones is currently in the making. The commercial drone business is “hot”. It re-ceives substantial funding and draws a lot of talent. If AWE was presented as a drone business it would be-come easier to demonstrate its technical feasibility. After all, it is just a drone as all the others. As a drone business AWE could also attract additional investors that are not necessarily interested in an energy investment but in the new commercial drone market. The advantages of wind

drones could not only be showed in comparison to wind turbines but could also be compared to other drone busi-nesses. Namely, it could be shown that the economic po-tential of wind drones is much larger than that of many of the currently hyped uses of drones. Wind drones can rightfully be called the trillion dollar drones. They are also the only drones that can save the world.

Identifying AWE as a special use for drones will bring new players from the aviation and drone industry to AWE. While this will intensify competition amongst AWE com-panies it will also bring added know-how and funding and will ultimately lead to a faster deployment of wind drones.

The presentation will also discuss the current status and the future of the AWE industry as seen by Daidalos Cap-ital, the only investor specialised solely in AWE and the most successful investor in the industry so far.

While the privately funded seed-stage Daidalos Capital AWE Fund I provided valuable resources to AWE in its in-fant years, the industry has matured and faces somewhat different challenges today and in the future. The Daida-los Capital AWE Fund II has been given a new structure and new investment options to meet these challenges. It will be shown how the Daidalos Capital Fund II can assist AWE companies and the AWE industry in their future de-velopment while granting its investors a unique access to a trillion dollar industry in the making.