sees.ai
"Precision insight at network scale"
UK drone autonomy firm; first to hold routine BVLOS CAA authorisation; OS for autonomous grid inspection; Boeing-backed.
sees.ai is a UK-based autonomous drone technology company headquartered in Chichester, England (Lavant House, a restored former school near the South Downs). The company was founded in 2018 by John McKenna and Damien Charveriat, along with a founding team drawn from Apple, CERN, McLaren Formula 1, Oracle Racing, and multi-billion-dollar hedge funds — backgrounds that span safety-critical engineering, data science, and large-scale systems design.
The company's mission is to unlock the full potential of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for inspecting and monitoring critical national infrastructure. sees.ai has built a proprietary drone operating system that connects every element of a mission: onboard autonomy systems, off-board control room software, and a centralized data management and performance-improvement layer. This architecture enables drone operators to run VLOS, EVLOS, and Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) missions from a single, centrally supervised control point — removing the need for a geographically dispersed team of on-site pilots.
In March 2021, sees.ai became the first company in the United Kingdom to receive authorisation from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) for routine BVLOS drone operations in non-segregated airspace, including operations over live overhead power lines. This regulatory milestone places sees.ai alongside Amazon and Boeing as one of only eight entities in the UK's BVLOS sandbox.
A landmark commercial deployment is with National Grid, which in 2025 launched the world's first centralised, autonomous aerial inspection capability across its electricity transmission network in partnership with sees.ai. This program systematically collects consistent, AI-compatible data from the full asset base, enabling both granular and system-level infrastructure insights at scale.
The company is Boeing-backed and raised £3.65 million in a funding round in October 2025, co-led by Sustainable Future Ventures, Hearst Ventures, and Elbow Beach. As of early 2025, the company employed approximately 20 people. sees.ai is a member of ARPAS-UK (the Association of Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems) and the UK Industrial Innovation (UKII) ecosystem.
Primary type & automation activities this supplier delivers:
sees.ai Autonomous Flight Platform
Contact sees.ai
WEBSITE
https://www.sees.ai/HEADQUARTERS
United Kingdom
Company Facts
Founded
2018
Primary Role
Software/Algorithm
Company Size
-
Primary Region
Europe
Annual Sales
-
Funding Stage
-
Funding Total
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