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Czech startup conquers America and expands further. Makes drone tracking devices

22.01. 2025
line-arrow Czech startup conquers America and expands further. Makes drone tracking devices

They came up with a technological solution at the right time. Dronetag from Prague started as a couple of students who saw an opportunity in the upcoming drone monitoring law and, with the help of the European Space Agency and NATO, dominated the market not only in the US.

The article was taken from seznamzpravy.cz

Almost 1.67 million drone pilots are registered with the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) alone. But there are probably more flying over our heads, because not everyone is registered or has a machine that can be tracked.

You can listen to the information and see the footage in the introductory video report.

However, visibility of small helicopters and aircraft on flight charts is absolutely necessary for safety in the sky and on the ground. That’s why, from 2021, new legislation will require pilots to equip their machines with so-called remote ID so that they can also be seen by other operators and avoid collisions and crashes.

First in America. Despite cheaper competition from China

And this is exactly what the Czech startup has focused on Dronetag, which was founded only in 2019, but quickly gained the support of investors and accelerators and incubators from ESA and NATO. The company has been so successful that it has also earned a dominant position in the US, where it was the first supplier in the world to get permission to offer its identification module, covering 70 percent of the US market by 2023.

That data is very hard to find. We relied on public statistics from our dealers and monitoring of competitors’ sales. Now it’s much harder to determine how the market shares are divided, because when we were most successful at it, there were maybe ten of these solutions. Now there are 40 solutions and that is very difficult to monitor. We are still the leader in America, we have the biggest marketshare, but the question is how many ,” explains Lukáš Brchl, CEO and co-founder of the company.

Quite often, Chinese manufacturers are there as well. However, the added value of their devices is only the low price, but even so, they obviously distort the market figures ,” he adds.

What their production looks like, few would expect

Dronetag and its 40 employees do not manufacture the equipment in any factory. It is based in a villa in Prague’s Vinohrady district, where it managed to produce 14,000 devices last year. In 2022, it will still produce only 90 of them, and in 2023 it will produce 4,900. Even the annual sales of the company thus grew from 10 thousand to one, and then last year two million euros.

Today, the Czech startup coordinates flights in 20 countries on four continents, and the fact that it is still growing is confirmed by the fact that it expanded into another market last August.

One of our big successes has been our expansion into Japan, especially because of all the competing solutions on the market there, we are still the only solution that is compatible in America, Europe and Japan, so we still hold our leadership there,” Brchl confirms to SZ Business and Tech.

So what does the startup produce?

And what exactly does Dronetag do? It offers pilots and drone manufacturers not only software, but also hardware in the form of miniature boxes that are attached to the machines and, if they require 3D printed packaging, it manufactures them entirely in Prague. If they have an integrated module, they have them made in Taiwan – but the finalisation, firmware updates and testing end up being done in Prague anyway.

This is our most popular device and the smallest identification device on the market, which is also the best-selling in the world. Using industrial Velcro, it is placed on the drone, switched on, and then within a few kilometres using a mobile phone, the drone can be tracked on a map ,” Lukáš Brchl shows the first of the company’s products in the opening video report of this article.

And in addition, we have a device that not only sends identification to the environment using conventional radio networks, but also sends it to us in the software platform using mobile networks, and is therefore suitable for more futuristic secure applications – for example, in the delivery of parcels by drones, or even coordinated operations that are to be carried out in secrecy, where only a certain group of people have access to flight data,” reveals the head of the company another of the products.

A new generation of products

However, since the market has changed since the adoption of new laws on the obligation to equip drones with remote ID, the number of manufacturers has increased, and the machines are now equipped directly from the factory, the offer of the Czech startup has also expanded – from transmitting identification more to receiving it.

We have ground receiving equipment in two variants – one of them is battery powered and detects the surrounding drone traffic. They don’t even necessarily need to have our identification devices, they just need to comply with the new legislation. And when this device detects the ambient traffic, it will start giving its owner audio notifications, so they don’t have to keep looking at the app. He only opens it when there’s something going on around him. ,” shows another product of Dronetag, its co-founder Lukáš Brchl.

And the last device is a stationary version of our terrestrial receiver. This is particularly suited to installations around airports and critical infrastructure, as it comes in a box that is waterproof and can thus be used for permanent installations and drone detection ,” he adds in the video report.

Support from the European Space Agency and NATO

Dronetag received the largest one-off support from the Brno-based IT company Y Soft, which invested CZK 15 million in 2022 through its venture capital platform. However, the most significant help was received elsewhere.

The Prague-based startup started with a group of enthusiastic students who came to the attention of the ESA BIC Czech Republic space incubator, which helped to establish it, and from which it received a grant of 50,000 euros, i.e. 1.25 million crowns for development.

“ESA BIC Czech Republic is operated in the Czech Republic by the CzechInvest agency and within the framework of the project Dronetag received 50 thousand euros. But because it is a very successful company, it did not stop with ESA BIC, but also managed to get other grants and other projects that CzechInvest offers – whether technology incubation or a whole range of other activities. In total, CzechInvest has supported Dronetag in the amount of several million crowns,” said Michal Kuneš, Programme Manager of ESA BIC Czech Republic.

Cooperation with world armies not only from the Alliance

And Dronetag was also selected as the first Czech representative in the DIANA acceleration programme, which is used for the development, protection and accelerated adoption of technologies to ensure NATO’s technological superiority. It received 100,000 euros or approximately 2.5 million crowns from the budget of the North Atlantic Alliance.

They actually solved a problem that a lot of startups struggle with – an app for defense, military, military environments. If you think about the situation on the modern battlefield today, even in Ukraine, there are a lot of drones in the airspace and you need to know which one is yours and which one is the adversary’s. And Dronetag has the technology to solve that. ,” explains Radka Konderlová, Senior Director of the Industrial Cooperation Section of the Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic.

We, of course, continue to monitor Dronetag, we are in close contact, and they have been put in contact with other militaries around the world, not just within the Alliance, through the accelerator program. That has offered it tremendous opportunities in terms of application and they’ve actually been able to grow much more. I must also say that Dronetag is one of the companies that greatly appreciates the government’s help in supporting small startups and defence ,” he adds in the article’s opening video report.

It is an investment in the future that is costing us a huge amount of internal resources now – not only money but also the time of qualified people, but the potential benefits will become apparent in three to five years. It’s not that simple in the Defence Market ,” adds the head of the startup Lukáš Brchl.

We have been developing a network of ground-based receivers that we are gradually installing around the world during 2024 – these are detection systems that monitor drone traffic around critical infrastructure such as airports, monuments and the like. So, we are gradually moving from transmitters to receivers, and within 2025 we would like to become the best in the field of ground receivers. So we are already arranging a lot of interesting installations at critical infrastructure sites ,” he concludes for SZ Byznys a Tech.

Author of the article: Jan Marek

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