Drone manufacturer Skydio Inc. today announced it has raised $170 million on a unicorn valuation topping $1 billion to enable it to expand globally and accelerate product development.

The Series D round was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Growth Fund and included Linse Capital, Next47, IVP and UP Partners. Skydio becomes the first U.S. drone company with a valuation of more than $1 billion, a market that has been dominated by Chinese manufacturers.

Founded in 2014, Skydio leverages artificial intelligence to create intelligent drones for use by consumers, enterprises and government customers. The company was started by founders who met as grad students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2009 and went on to help start Google LLC’s Wing Project. The company’s first drone, the R1, was released in 2018.

Drone companies ranging from giants such as Shenzhen DJI Sciences and Technologies Ltd. to smaller consumer manufacturers are a dime a dozen in 2021. Skydio, along with being American and making its drones in the U.S., pitches itself as offering an advanced level of autonomous flying.

Powered by Skydio Autonomy, the technology is said to deliver the skills of an expert pilot, using AI to understand the world around it and make intelligent predictive decisions. Using the technology, Skydio’s drones can fly themselves through demanding tasks and also remain safe from obstacles while being flown manually.

Speaking to The Financial Times, Skydio Chief Executive Officer Adam Bry said that though the potential for drones has caught the imagination of people in the consumer world “the paradigm is still this manually flown world.”

“The real shift that’s happening in the market is this transition to fully autonomous operations, where the drone lives in a dock, it’s connected to the internet and it flies itself on demand wherever it’s needed,” Bry added.

The funding for Skydio is the first significant round into a drone company since DJI was placed on the U.S. Department of Commerce Entity List in December due to Chinese spying fears, limiting how it can work with U.S. companies. The move is expected to propel growth in the U.S. drone sector.

Including the new funding, Skydio has raised $340 million to date, according to Crunchbase. Previous investors include NTT Docomo Ventures, Playground Global, Levitate Capital, Accel, Parcel B and Nvidia GPU Ventures.

Image: Skydio