Investing in SiFly

By Ray Rothrock and Matt Kaplan

Drones are rapidly becoming an essential tool for public safety and the commercial economy. With a new FAA waiver process that reviews applications in hours instead of months, there are now 6,000 drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs in the U.S., a fourfold increase since 2024. At the same time, utilities are increasingly using drones to monitor power lines and other critical infrastructure, while agricultural operators are deploying them to inspect millions of acres more frequently and at lower costs. Across these markets, commercial drones are starting to reach adoption at scale.

But the utility of most commercial drones remains fundamentally constrained by how long they can stay in the air. Most multirotor drones fly for roughly 30 to 40 minutes before returning to charge or swap batteries. SiFly has built a novel platform, the Q12, that remains airborne for 2 or 3 hours, combining the hovering capability of a conventional drone with dramatically greater endurance and range. SiFly has now flown the Q12 through thousands of flights and hundreds of hours of testing. The aircraft flies 4x longer and up to 10x farther than leading enterprise drones while carrying payloads of up to 10 pounds.

Now, police departments can keep an aircraft over an incident for hours rather than continuously rotating drones, pilots, and batteries among an expensive network of docking stations. Utilities can inspect longer stretches of critical infrastructure, and agricultural operators can cover significantly more acreage with the same number of pilots. Longer endurance means fewer aircraft, fewer operators, fewer docking stations, and ultimately a lower cost per mission - which means more missions. Customers in these industries consistently reinforced that endurance is among the most important constraints on existing drone operations.

CEO Brian Hinman is a serial entrepreneur and inventor with 68 patents who previously founded PictureTel, Polycom, 2Wire, and Mimosa Networks. Several members of the SiFly leadership team have worked alongside him across prior companies, bringing experience in engineering complex products and in moving them into production and commercial scale.

Shield Capital is proud to lead SiFly's Series A. Our investment reflects our conviction that longer-endurance autonomous aircraft can materially expand the role of drones across public safety, critical infrastructure, agriculture, and ultimately national security.