There’s big news in the sky: Skycatch has sold 1,000 drones to construction giant Komatsu (and already delivered 200). Read the story here.

The Skycatch Explore 1 drones are semi-autonomous quadcopters made in partnership with dronemaker DJI. They’ll use Skycatch’s machine-vision software to control Komatsu’s robot construction vehicles and deliver real-time insights and autonomous execution.

Our kudos to Founder Chris Sanz and the Skycatch team for navigating their way up and down the drone stack until they nailed product-market fit. We were the first investors in Skycatch in 2013, when the drone industry was in its infancy. Skycatch had a vision and core solution which remain the same today, but the nascent industry’s constraints required that they develop both hardware and software to launch the dream. As the industry matured, Skycatch has been able to tighten their focus on that core idea and secure their place in Drone 2.0. (Read our drone white paper here.)

Being a first check writer means that we have to bet on Bee Founders to navigate the course of entrepreneurship. A critical part of pre-seed investing is committing along with them to a sometimes rough, often uncertain journey through uncharted terrain. When we backed Chris, it was as much his grit and passion as the solutions promised by flying robots. The DJI partnership and now the Komatsu sale go a long way to validating those early indicators—and drones as a legitimate solution for the enterprise.

Stack discipline is a core evaluation framework we use every day at Bee Partners and it applies as much to founders as to investors. We are honored to call Skycatch one of our Bee partners.

Image: Skycatch