Image: Lily
How awesome would it be to just toss a drone into the air and let it do the rest? Well, that’s Lily. Lily is an autonomous camera drone that you chuck into the air to let it record whatever it is you’re doing automatically.
Lily is the brainchild of Antoine Balaresque and Henry Bradlow, two students from UC Berkeley. The startup was founded out of a UC Berkeley robotics lab, and since its launch in 2013, has received over $15 million in funding from multiple investors. But rather than launching a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo to gain additional traction, CEO Antoine Balaresque decided to make Lily available through pre-order on its website. Eight months and 60,000 pre-orders later, Balaresque told Re/Code Lily is hovering above pre-order sales topping $34,000,000. For a drone or startup product, that’s prodigious.
On a more technical note, Lily promises to be as simple as possible. It’s designed to be a flying GoPro for users that have never laid hands on a drone. For $799, rain or shine, Lily is pitching to record you in high-definition 1080p at 60 frames (or 720p at 120 frames for slow-mo) while zooming at tops speeds of 25 miles an hour. Oh, and it does all this autonomously after you toss it up. Lily takes off this Summer at $999.
On another drone-related note, be sure to register your drone with the FAA before February 19 or you’ll face stiff fines.
Via: Re/Code
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