Transforming a Drone Company into a Data Company
Kespry’s announcement of an expansion to their executive team represented a major evolution for the company. In Jitender Aswani and Jim Allison, the company now finds itself in a unique position as they continue to enhance an aerial intelligence platform that’s an end-to-end solution, which is something Kespry CEO George Mathew identified as a focus. Being able to do so has and will rely on the data that their solution gathers and processes, and that focus on data ties into the evolution this new team is focused on enabling.
As the newly appointed VP of Engineering, Jim Allison has plenty of insight around how data can drive an organization and an entire industry. He has more than twenty years of experience in engineering development with high growth companies, and most recently was on the consumer side of the drone industry. His experience in that space is just one of the factors that will play into his plans for Kespry and their customers.
Allison laid out why he’s made the move to focus on the enterprise after being focused on the consumer for most of his career, but we wanted to learn more about why he considers Kespry to represent such a unique opportunity. In the interview below, we discuss his recent experience at Lily Robotics, how he defines a complete drone solution, what role Kespry will have in the future of the industry and plenty more.
Jeremiah Karpowicz: In what ways will you be relying on your more than twenty years of experience in engineering development to ensure the Kespry solution remains one that’s easy for customers to use right out of the box?
Jim Allison: I’ll be leveraging years of experience in software, artificial intelligence, integrated systems and robotics to realize the Kespry vision of autonomy that delivers significant advantage in realized customer value vs. required drone expertise. Kespry enables the customer to be an expert in their domain and achieve maximum value in drone-enabled data capture and analytics, without becoming a drone expert.
We have a maniacal focus on simplicity and ease of use. We achieve this by digging deep into the most frequent use cases of Kespry customers to determine the right features, their relative priorities and the most effective way to present them.
Kespry has always been diligent about making sure only very high quality hardware and software that has met some stringent standards is released to customers. I plan to continue that trend and find ways for us to keep improving with a full end-to-end, systems integration approach to testing, launch readiness and the ability of the Kespry analytics pipeline to scale with customer growth.
As I’m sure you can appreciate, there are some complicated challenges within this scope, which is where the insight that comes from multiple successful iterations leading diverse technical teams and delivering market-leading products will come into play. I’m looking forward to the challenge.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about your time with Lily Robotics, as the company created some major headlines earlier this year. What were your biggest takeaways from that experience?
Lily had a bold vision. Autonomous drones are complicated and the team ran into challenges that needed time to resolve. I joined the team a little too late and, while attempting to recover and deliver on the original vision, we ran out of runway and adequate funding to complete product development. Delivering truly autonomous drones is a very difficult technical challenge. The companies that get this right (and Kespry is one) have a significant competitive advantage in the marketplace.
