Voltair

Voltair builds drones that ‘perch’ like birds to recharge on power lines. The grid is the world’s largest machine. This allows our flying robots to go anywhere. Simply put, removing battery swaps is the last step to deploy UAVs autonomously at scale. After building drones for the Air Force and DARPA, Ronan realized this was both practical and technically feasible. Power utilities are the perfect first customer. From talking to 50+ power utilities (including our 3 customers), it’s clear that they need better tech to observe their 1000+ miles of line. A given utility pole is inspected about once a decade. Why is this timeline a problem? Inspections identify maintenance concerns before they cause faults. Faults cause power outages, and spark wildfires - like the Eaton Fire in early 2025 where 19 people lost their lives and nearly 10,000 structures were destroyed. Fires bankrupt utilities and make them uninsurable. Autonomous drones can deliver over 20x the inspection coverage for the same cost. Reducing wildfire risk is a top priority for our customers, and utilities already know drones are the best solution (early pilots find over 5x more maintenance concerns with drones than ground inspections). Hayden knows this best. He worked in system protection at a power utility throughout college. We’re operating as a full-stack power utility asset inspection contractor. Since June, we’ve validated our core charging tech on a power line, built 5x flying prototypes, and inspected ~2000 poles. We’re post-revenue. There’s 168M poles in the US. Going rates for inspections are ~$45/pole, a $7.6B market. The horizontals for a system of drones distributed on the grid are massive. Our drones are inexpensive (<$5k), so our margins look like a SaaS company. At scale we are a new infrastructure layer for data on the physical world.