The Story of Tethered Drones: Building the Future of Aerial Security
Sometimes the most transformative innovations start with a constraint. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Guilhem de Marliave shared how a seemingly limiting requirement – having to tether a drone during a Paris mission – sparked an idea that would reshape aerial security.
From Limitation to Innovation
During an internship at a French drone company, Guilhem encountered a common problem in the drone industry: limited flight time. “With drones batteries, usually you fly for 30 minutes to 50 minutes ish, and it’s great for some short missions like inspections, but it’s very limiting, in fact for longer applications,” he explains.
Then came the moment that would change everything. “One day we had a mission where we had to put a leash on the drone for legal reason to be able to fly in Paris. And that’s kind of the way the ID came to build Tether drones, to solve the limitation on battery, but also to solve the communications and legal permissions.”
Early Days and Market Evolution
The journey from concept to market wasn’t straightforward. “At first we tried a lot of things and the pricing weren’t right, the targets weren’t right, and so on. So it took, I don’t know, eight, nine months and we finally made the first sale,” Guilhem recalls.
This period of experimentation led to a crucial insight about the drone market’s evolution. “The maturity of the drone market is now at a stage where for each application it will have a specific aircraft with different capabilities. So we are going away from the time where everyone thought that one drone would solve everything.”
Breaking Into Global Markets
Rather than following the traditional defense industry playbook of relationship-based sales, the team took an unconventional digital-first approach. “We builded all the marketing, the go to market strategy through the web, through internet. Even if at first it sounded a bit counterintuitive, especially in the defense sector, but actually it worked well,” Guilhem shares.
The strategy paid off. Today, the company has deployed over 1,000 systems globally and achieved 50% growth last year. Their technology has been used at some of the world’s largest events, including “the Super Bowl, for instance, in Atlanta. And this year or so we have been engaged also in the Football World Cup in Qatar on the Rider cup.”
Real-World Impact
The company’s systems have proven valuable across various security applications. In Montana, “they used our tele drones for Pear Stadium and they were looking on the mountains around to see there were people lost at night. They were so checking money transfers between sales points of beverages and food. They were looking into restricted areas to see if no one was over trespassing.”
Vision for the Future
Looking ahead, the company has ambitious plans to revolutionize aerial security. “Our goal is to foster adoption by making Tether Drone technology fully autonomous… and to build the right apps for the right missions,” Guilhem explains. The vision extends to “developing fully autonomous tele drone boxes that can be remotely deployed on sites borders and controlled through kind of a cloud system, which will really widen the market and the value can bring mostly in the private security sector.”
This focus on autonomy and remote deployment could transform how organizations approach security, particularly with major events like the upcoming Olympics in France. As Guilhem notes, “Tether drones are, let’s say small parts of the whole system of course, but it’s always finding the way to make hardware and data sensors collaborate well through the right network so that we can collaborate well and solve those kind of crises faster.”
From a regulatory constraint in Paris to securing some of the world’s largest events, the company’s journey shows how innovation often comes from embracing and building upon limitations rather than trying to overcome them.