Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures (“VKAV”) is pleased to announce its investment of US$1 million as part of Cloudline’s seed round to support its growth and commercial expansion. Launched in South Africa with a global ambition, Cloudline is building both hardware and software to operate a network of autonomous unmanned airships with unmatched flight endurance, safety, and cost and energy efficiency that redefines aerial monitoring as well as potentially the way we deliver goods and services to the world.
In the unmanned aerial vehicle space, conventional drone-based solutions have penetrated the African market with very specific use cases due to the limitation of drones on payload, endurance, and radius. Cloudline aims to solve this problem by providing an all-electric aircraft platform with unmatched flight endurance, safety and cost efficiency. Its airship is designed to achieve a 10-20x cost advantage compared to conventional aerial alternatives and >10x endurance against piloted aerial vehicles (e.g. drones).
Cloudline was founded by Spencer Horne, who was motivated by a vision to transform people’s lives through transportation and technology. He has assembled a team of South African talent who worked to design, build, optimize, test and eventually launch the airship.
This funding round will help Cloudline pursue more commercial deployment opportunities as well as attracting more talent from engineering, production, sales background to take Cloudline to the next level.
Satoshi Shinada, Partner at VKAV, will join the Board of Cloudline, supporting its global expansion strategies and driving potential collaboration with strategic partners. Satoshi Shinada noted that this investment fits within VKAVs vision of backing category-defining companies who have the opportunity to scale from Africa to global markets. “We backed Cloudline because we believe that their proprietary technology and stellar team with strong focus on execution will make them the category leader in the UAV space, and lead the transition to an alternative aerial infrastructure across Africa and the rest of the globe.”
