Former White House adviser Pippa Malmgren saw a gap in the market for drones to help real estate collect data nearly a decade ago. She tells Emily Wright how that early call is paying off.
Pippa Malmgren is a master of the long game. Staunchly strategic, she has built a reputation for being able to look beyond today’s market conditions and make a call on tomorrow’s trends. Some might think that takes nerves of steel, but she considers it nothing more than good sense.
“As an economist, my job is to identify the investable trends coming up on the horizon,” she says matter-of-factly. Indeed, she has made a career out of it – most notably by serving as George W Bush’s economic adviser when he became US president in 2001, and then through her consultancy practice DRPM Group. “I called the financial crisis early and I got it right,” she says. “I told my clients to sell by May 2007 and they did. People tend to trust me.”
But it is one thing to make a correct market call, it is another to take a calculated risk on an emerging trend early enough to be first out of the gates. And that is what Malmgren has done with H Robotics, the automated drone business she co-founded in 2011.
One of the few players in a market that remains nascent outside of China, the London-based company – which boasts a team of former McLaren engineers – manufactures commercial drones that are more than just surveillance tools. Rather, they are automated data hubs programmed to relay key project information back to the client, whether a property developer or mining operator, in real time. These drones can be deployed for everything from live asset management to 3D modelling and valuations.
Malmgren firmly believes that drones are likely to become an increasingly integral tool for sectors such as real estate, construction and mining, where there is a necessity to view, audit and survey large assets. The problem, she adds, is that too many people still think of them as a children’s toy or a delivery tool. That’s a misconception that she says could not be further from the truth.
“People are confused about what drones actually are. I can see why”
Pippa Malmgren
Teleporting perception
“People are confused about what drones actually are. I can see why,” Malmgren says. “Today, almost every drone manufacturer is focused on the consumer retail market. Drones are seen by many as a children’s toy. Equally, a drone can be used as a term to describe a cruise missile. Well, when a child’s toy and a cruise missile are both called the same thing, we have a serious language problem.”
The second challenge, Malmgren continues, is to overcome the perception that drones are used solely to deliver something: “a pizza, a book from Amazon”. “What they are even better at bringing to you is data – they are not so much about the movement of something from A to B, but about moving a perception into the third dimension.”
This, Malmgren says, is the crux of what she wants to achieve with H Robotics – creating machines loaded with enough software, cameras and sensors to relay highly detailed, not to mention valuable, information back to the operator.
“Effectively, we are teleporting perception,” she adds. “We’re allowing you to sit wherever you are, anywhere in the world, pick up a mobile phone or a smart device and see your assets in real time at the push of a button. We have created what is basically an autonomous vehicle that can go up in the air, over the water or over the land and not only give you that live feed but allow you to share that data with your team. If your CEO is in New York, your CTO is in Tokyo and the rest of the team is in London, you are all able to look at it.”
Malmgren singles out real estate as a sector she wants her offering to help. Working with construction companies across Western Europe, her drones are being used to ensure the build process stays on plan, help with logistics management and surveys, and act as an on-site security system.
H Robotics is also working with BT and Intel to secure “their most sophisticated communications technologies” so that their autonomous vehicles can work with satellites to achieve 4G, 3G and Wi-Fi hotspots with virtually no latency.
As for cost, Malmgren says that H Robotics’ drones are around double the price of a good-quality toy version. “Our nearest direct competitor charges more than three times as much as we do,” she adds.
What is it that a commercial drone offers that sets it apart from a standard model designed for retail consumers? For a start, says Malmgren, it needs to be a completely autonomous tool, which many are not. Structurally, it has to be able to withstand all types of weather, which is something that most consumer drones are not designed to cope with.
And then there is the software. It must be highly advanced, highly technical and offer the maximum levels of data protection. “We have made a British product that uses European and American technology, that collects very deep data, that is highly secure and controlled by the client,” says Malmgren.
This final point, she adds, is one of H Robotics’ unique selling points – and was the catalyst behind her initial decision to set up the business in the first instance.
Out of stealth mode
Like many good ideas, the concept itself is simple. But the journey to market has been infinitely more complicated. Malmgren set the wheels in motion back in 2011, having noticed a source of geopolitical tension on the horizon.
“I could see back then that there was going to be an issue where there would eventually be a place in the market for a non-Chinese data gathering system,” she says. “A need for a system that met with Western surveillance compliance. We were very, very early on that call. Back then there wasn’t even really a drone market out there, as they cost around a hundred grand at the time.”
And so Malmgren did what she does best, setting aside perceptions of the current market and planning for the future. For the next nine years she worked with her team and used their head start to research, develop and perfect the structure and technical capabilities of the H Robotics drones. This set the company up to come out of stealth mode last year, right at the start of “an entirely new era of technology”.
But even now, Malmgren says, the power of using drones for commercial and data collection purposes is not fully appreciated, or even realised.
“We just did a demo for one of the biggest utilities companies in the world and they had never seen an autonomous drone flight,” she says. “They had been doing all of their inspections manually, which is actually a disaster because then none of your mission paths are identical and therefore your data is not comparable.
“The knock-on effect is that you can’t deploy AI or machine learning over that data. So even after all of that time spent in R&D, we are still as a very early stage of the industrial application of drones.”
And although Malmgren and colleagues have done so much to move the industry away from its consumer focus, she knows that for many companies, experimenting with toy drones has at least started them on a new journey.
“That was an entry point, and now companies are realising they can do things much more efficiently and safely with a tool designed specifically for the commercial sector,” Malmgren says. “I saw that gap in the market nearly a decade ago.”
To send feedback, e-mail emily.wright@egi.co.uk or tweet @EmilyW_9 or @estatesgazette
