DroneDeploy

Nicholas Pilkington studied computer science, applied mathematics and information systems at Rhodes University in South Africa, then earned an MPhil in natural language processing and signal processing and a PhD in machine learning at the University of Cambridge. He and his schoolmates Mike Winn and Jono Millin began working with drones in 2011, trying to help rangers in South Africa catch rhino poachers — and found the existing tooling so cumbersome that they decided to rebuild the drone software stack themselves. Pilkington co-founded DroneDeploy in 2013 through the AngelPad accelerator in San Francisco and has served as CTO since. He has led the engineering of the platform's core capabilities — automated flight, cloud-based photogrammetry and mapping, and more recently the AI and computer-vision systems that turn aerial and ground-level imagery into actionable site intelligence — as DroneDeploy built one of the largest repositories of drone-captured mapping data in the world.

Jono Millin grew up in South Africa and studied computer science, applied mathematics and information systems before taking an MSc in artificial intelligence and beginning a PhD in machine learning at the University of Edinburgh, which he left to start DroneDeploy. In 2011 he, Mike Winn and Nick Pilkington had tried to use drones to help rangers protect rhinos from poachers in a 7,500-square-mile South African park, and came away convinced that drones needed radically simpler software — phone-based control and cloud-shared data instead of specialist training and Windows laptops. Millin co-founded DroneDeploy in 2013 through the AngelPad accelerator in San Francisco. He has held product and data leadership roles across the company's life and serves as Co-founder and Chief Data Officer, shaping how the platform organizes and extracts value from one of the world's largest repositories of reality-capture data spanning construction, agriculture, energy and industrial inspection.