Drone Amplified ignites with $500,000

Drone Amplified, a US-based wildfire management drone developer licensed by University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), has received $500,000 in follow-on seed funding from non-profit venture capital firm Invest Nebraska, Silicon Prairie News reported on Friday.
The transaction was completed in November 2018 but had not been publicly announced.
Founded in 2017, Drone Amplified is commercialising a drone product called Ignis that performs fire management testing on country land on behalf of landowners, public wild park authorities and government agencies.
The drone’s payload contains chemical spheres the size of a ping-pong ball which are injected with glycol to ignite upon impact with the ground, enabling clients to conduct targeted stress tests on specific pieces of land.
Drone Amplified believes its product offers better oversight and cost-efficiency than helicopter-dependent fire management schemes while also reducing human exposure to potential hazards.
The spinout was co-founded by Carrick Detweiler and Sebastian Elbaum, who had previously worked together to start the government-funded Nimbus Lab at UNL, where university research into unmanned aerial vehicles is conducted.
Invest Nebraska reportedly supplied Drone Amplified with an undisclosed amount of seed funding in 2017. The company disclosed plans to raise $340,000 and $600,000 of equity funding in  securities filings in October 2017 and September 2018 respectively, but did not disclose whether it had met those targets.