Skyfire Consulting has announced it has been acquired by Echelon AI, an autonomous and swarming AI company for Uncrewed Aerial Systems (UAS), backed by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund. The combined entity, SkyfireAI, will integrate AI with UAV/UAS technologies to support critical missions for public safety and global defense applications. The combined company wields deep technical expertise in AI/ML, swarming, applied physics, and uncrewed flight systems. Skyfire’s founders and core team also have backgrounds in federal, state and local law enforcement; military service (Navy/Air Force/Army); the CIA; DARPA; firefighting and EMS-first response; and military and civil aviation.
AI for the Future of Drone Technology
“We couldn’t be more excited to join forces with our partner Skyfire. We’ve worked together closely almost since formation; with this acquisition, we have now formally combined the world’s best minds in UAS/UAV AI, together with the most experienced team in public safety and DOD drone implementation,” said Don Mathis, Echelon Co-founder and CEO. “SkyfireAI is poised to shape the future of drone technology with advanced AI solutions that will unlock the power of autonomous single and multi-ship drone formations.”
Matt Sloane, Skyfire’s Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the combined company, added: “We’re ideally positioned to help bring the public safety drone flight into the AI age, leveraging autonomy and swarming capabilities to help protect communities and to save lives.” The legacy Skyfire team joins the engineers, AI and data scientists of Echelon to create the new SkyfireAI.
Autonomy for Dynamic Mission Success
“As drone hardware becomes increasingly commoditized, real differentiation lies in the AI mission control software and its associated technology stack,” said Eric Malawer, Echelon Co-founder and COO. SkyfireAI leverages AI including stacked agent architecture, generative AI and AI-on-the-edge to enable drone autonomy operations. This allows drones to adapt dynamically in real-time to evolving environments, hardware states and mission objectives, maximizing effectiveness, efficiency and safety. The company’s proprietary mission control platform offers a fully integrated solution for the world’s most demanding public safety and defense missions, and it can operate across multiple drone hardware configurations and manufacturers.
“At its core Skyfire is an AI company,” added Brian Davidson, Co-founder and CTO. “Our platform is purpose-built to help our clients cost-effectively meet their needs, to be seamlessly customizable to those needs, and to support them as the technology evolves and the mission-set becomes increasingly more complex.”
Skyfire already has a well-established track record of serving DoD and Public Safety agencies to establish and manage drone systems and operations. “Historically this support included everything from flying the drones to offering best-in-class regulatory support, training, and hardware integration,” said Sloane. “Now, we build on that capability by integrating a truly fantastic AI software platform into our client’s operations, ensuring that they remain at the very cutting edge of capability while enabling superior results ranging from improved response time to enhanced situation awareness.”
