DroneDeploy

DroneDeploy is a San Francisco reality capture company that turns drone and ground robot imagery into measurable site data. Founded in 2013, it began with aerial mapping and photogrammetry for agriculture and construction, then expanded into interior progress capture and asset inspection for energy and industrial clients. Contractors use the platform for earthwork volume calculations, schedule verification and as-built documentation, tasks that previously took a survey crew. The company says its users have captured roughly 20 trillion square feet of visual data. Procore agreed in July 2026 to acquire DroneDeploy for $845 million, a deal that folds reality capture directly into the project management platform most U.S. contractors already run.

The origin has nothing to do with construction. In 2011 three friends who had grown up together in South Africa, Mike Winn, Nick Pilkington and Jono Millin, went looking for a way to help rangers watch 7,500 square miles of Kruger National Park for poachers. Drones existed, but flying them meant weeks of training, a Windows laptop, and no simple way to share what came back. The three asked why a phone could not fly the aircraft and why the imagery could not go straight to the cloud. They moved to San Francisco, went through an incubator, and turned that question into a company. The park work continues through DroneDeploy.org.

Two acquisitions widened the platform beyond the air. Rocos, bought in 2021, brought ground robotics. StructionSite, bought in 2022, brought 360-degree interior capture and its co-founder Matthew Daly, now the company’s chief marketing officer. The product line today splits into aerial mapping, ground capture, robotics and dock automation, robotic industrial inspection, and a visual intelligence layer sold as Safety AI, Progress AI and Earthworks AI. A separate service, Data on Demand, dispatches certified pilots for contractors who would rather not buy hardware or license their own crews.

The hardware side is deliberately open. The platform supports drones from the major manufacturers, common 360-degree cameras, automated docks, and ground robots including the Unitree Go2, and connects outward through more than 80 integrations covering project management systems and GIS tools such as QGIS and Esri ArcGIS via a WMTS feed. The company puts its current footprint at over 3 million sites in 180 countries and 2.8 billion images processed.

Teams evaluating the platform for regulated work will find it holds SOC 2 and ISO 27001 certifications, with encryption at rest and in transit and role-based permissions. DroneDeploy is remote-first and globally distributed, with staff ranging from construction veterans to robotics engineers and machine learning researchers, and it is certified by Great Place to Work. Contractors named on its construction page include Turner, Skanska, DPR, AECOM, Laing O’Rourke, Layton, Weitz, Skender and PCL.