Skymatics started out as a small drone based media company in the small country of Bermuda. We had a big idea to use our drones for a more technical purpose so we came up with a plan for branching out into the construction and agricultural industries. We took our idea and applied for the Future Agro Challenge as a way to present our new vision to see if we were on the right track and to our surprise we won! We’ve continued on since then and haven’t looked back.
Since early 2017, Skymatics has taken on a few private investments as well as begun trials of some of our crop analysis services for a number of large insurance companies throughout the US and Canada. A US office is next on the agenda with intentions to expand globally, first taking on Europe and South America.
How It All Began…
Jamillah Lodge, Business Development Officer at the Bermuda Economic Development Corporation, encouraged the firm to enter the Athens competition with their “cutting edge technology in robotics, engineering and computer software and applying it in diverse ways to aid in agricultural land management to monitor large tracts of farmland for moisture and nutrient content and instantly conveying this information back to central control stations.
The Athens event attracted entrants from all over the world, including Germany, Bulgaria, Morocco, Algeria and Denmark.
Speaking exclusively to The Royal Gazette, co-founder Connor Burns said: “We were pretty excited — we didn’t expect to win. We thought we would be a contender and big competitors in the field would win, but we ended up winning.” Having taken top honours against global competitors is something that all Bermudians can be proud of!
The two Bermudian entrepreneurs were on cloud nine after their pioneering aerial photography business snapped up a top prize at FAC Global Championships 2015 in Greece. Connor Burns (left) and EJ Burrows were the first Bermuda entrants in the International Future Agro Challenge (FAC) at Industry Disruptors in Athens and their Bermuda Aerial Media and subsidiary firm Skymatics took the top prize, including 7,000 euros in funding over a field of ten.
Lodge states, “their win is the realisation of a personal goal that I have had since becoming involved with Global Entrepreneurship Week — to get our local entrepreneurs international exposure so that they can increase their opportunities for success.”
Attending the FAC really helped us see where we stood in relation to other startups in the industry, winning the FAC Global Championships also gave us the motivation that we were on the right track!
Their win was just the start, having received credibility and media attention the founders set out to expand their business into new heights. EJ Burrows relocated to Canada setting up an office and everything has kicked off ever since!
Our vision for what we’ve done so far and what we plan to do in the future came from an in depth look at what our potential customers would need, what would make their lives easier and would pay for. You need all three of those things to have a successful product.