Drone merger expands group offering

The merger between Israeli drone safety company ParaZero and international drone services provider Delta Drone South Africa has resulted in the relisting of drones-as-a-service company Delta Drone International, based in Australia, on the Australian Securities Exchange to begin trading again from December 31.

The relisting came on the back of a strongly supported capital raise of $5-million at $0.04 a share, resulting in a market capitalisation of $20-million.

Delta Drone International will provide drone services to the mining, agriculture and engineering industries through a range of contract and project services including aerial surveying and mapping, security and surveillance, blast monitoring and fragment analysis, as well as safety system and compliance management.

In a statement released in December, the company said that the business was built to meet the demand for fast and accurate survey data, as well as to support all the regulatory, insurance and maintenance requirements needed to run these services safely and consistently.

The company said it planned to use the capital raise to expand into the Australian market, initially targeting drone services for country’s mining and agriculture industries. The capital raise would also enable the new entity to establish an Australian headquarters and expand its operations in Southern Africa. Moreover, funds from the capital raise would also be used for sales and marketing support in Australia, as well as research and development in Australia and Israel.

Prior to the merger, Delta Drone already provided drone services within the mining and agriculture sectors of South Africa, Ghana and Namibia, servicing customers such as mining majors South32 and Newmont Mining.

“This strategic merger provides the business with substantial growth opportunities, both in the short term and the long term. Australia’s vast mining and agriculture sectors provide an accelerated path to revenue, enabling mining companies to focus on extracting resources out of the ground, while we take care of collecting data from the air,” says Delta Drone International CEO Chris Clark.

The drone services provided would include managing safety, compliance, insurance, and maintenance. Clark said that the same-day survey data turnaround and reporting was key to increasing operational productivity, facilitating real-time planning and execution for large-scale mining companies.

He added that the group’s drone safety technology would be essential as global urban drone deliveries increase on the back of new US Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) final rules, which were announced in December, for unmanned aerial systems (UAS) – or drones – in the categories of operations over people, remote identification, and night operations.

Clark said that ParaZero’s drone parachutes were at the forefront of commercial drone flight waivers in beyond visual line-of-sight operations, including over people, and that the company was confident this type of technology would become a mandated safety standard as the industry evolves.

These final rules will apply to the expanding US drone sector, currently with more than 1.7-million drone registrations and 203 000 FAA-certificated remote pilots, according to 2020 FAA report. They will allow UAS operators to conduct flight operations over people and moving vehicles across four main categories, with varying degrees of flight permissions according to degrees of regulatory compliance.

“ParaZero’s UAS safety systems are well- positioned to provide an instrumental edge in supporting these new categories, based on ParaZero’s patented autonomous parachute technology, which is specifically designed and tested to meet regulator compliance for the required kinetic energy thresholds,” Clark concluded.