South Africa’s Cloudline Africa and five new drone startups, developing open-source, emerging technology digital public goods to address global challenges and create fairer opportunities for children and young people, are to receive seed funding from UNICEF’s Innovation Fund.
The other five drone startups are Bioverse Labs(Brazil), Dronfies Labs (Uruguay), Prokura Innovations (Nepal), qAira (Peru), and Rentadrone (Chile).
This funding is part of UNICEF’s larger drones programme exploring the use of the technology for a range of applications, including humanitarian supply chain systems and delivery, improved connectivity in hard-to-reach communities, and aerial imaging for better preparedness and response in emergencies.
Apart from benefitting from the seed investment provided by UNICEF’s Innovation Fund, these companies will also gain access to four humanitarian drone testing corridors in Africa and Central Asia, and UNICEF’s Ventures team and networks, providing support from technical assistance to networking with industry leaders, as well as creating a community around the open-source solutions developed.
Here is a brief summary about the six companies:
- Bioverse Labs (Brazil) uses drone imagery and machine learning to identify and map non-timber species of trees that are economically viable for supporting traditional modes of income generation for indigenous populations, thereby contributing to the sustainability of the Amazonian ecosystem.
- Cloudline Africa (South Africa) operates small-scale autonomous airships that have longer endurance and range than current commercial drones; their solution will help deliver medical supplies to hard-to-reach communities and reduce operational costs in the last-mile.
- Dronfies Labs (Uruguay) provides support to drone operations during emergency situations. They are developing an intelligent flight and traffic management system for drones in low connectivity settings that supports real-time data sharing for airspace management and multiple drone operations coordination.
- Prokura Innovations (Nepal) is developing a locally produced and low-cost drone system to tackle last-mile delivery of medicines, connecting underserved health posts to a surrounding equipped health facility.
- qAira (Peru) is developing a drone to monitor air quality, as well as developing algorithms to translate data acquired by sensors mounted in drones to visualize air quality parameters for environmental protection.
- Rentadrone (Chile) is developing solutions using machine learning, thermal and multispectral imagery to both automatically detect diseases on crops and detect, classify and organize the errors and damaged modules in Solar Power Plants, which will improve energy efficiency and the performance of sustainable energy sources.
UNICEF’s Innovation Fund invests (up to $100k) in early stage, open-source, emerging technology digital public goods with the potential to impact children on a global scale. It also provides product and technology assistance, support with business growth, access to a network of experts and partners to allow for scale and growth. The investments can go either to UNICEF Country Offices or to private sector companies in UNICEF programme countries.
