The drone startup that can save a water-logged Indian city

A flash flood in Mumbai in 2008. Photo credit: Michael Kohli.

Locked in my car in bumper-to-bumper traffic, I spent four nightmarish hours on a water-logged Delhi road one July evening. It was pouring cats and dogs and I was looking up at the sky, wondering if there was some way to grow wings.

A few days later, I got a mail from WeDoSky founder Jaspreet Makkar. No, he wasn’t going to make me fly.

But here’s what caught my attention. “We’ve opened our cloud-based mapping software, VisualAI, for beta,” Jaspreet wrote.

When Tech In Asia had written about WeDoSky first, it was essentially a drone company with data processing capabilities. But its new visual intelligence platform will now let any drone pilot upload aerial imagery to its cloud servers to generate actionable data.

So basically, if a government agency already has raw photos, it could use VisualAI to process them. And guess what that could be for? “To find out the low-lying areas and understand where water will get logged during a rainfall,” says Jaspreet.

The Delhi-based drone startup may have handled prestigious clients like CommonFloor, Supertech, and NDTV, but its latest move has just upped its relevance for me.

The next big leap

WeDoSky is a two-year-old company with over 400 projects under its belt. It has managed to stay bootstrapped and in business. What was the need for a new platform?

Photo credit Ed Schipul.

“We have seen drones grow from toys to the commoditized industrial tools they have now become. The next big leap will be around the intelligence that can be generated from raw aerial photos – and that’s where visualAI is headed,” says Jaspreet.

Most drone hardware is available from China at a minimal cost, and basic flight control software is open source in many cases. That means drones will soon become a commodity and almost everyone will have access to them.

The WeDoSky Team.

What’s on offer