Iona Drones hopes to be up and running in Ireland by late 2025, according to founder and CEO Etienne Louvet.
Getting parcels delivered in rural areas can be a bit of a chore for both businesses and customers. Spread between long distances, the business-to-consumer or last-mile deliveries in rural areas are not as fast, efficient or profitable for companies compared to urban areas – and certainly not as easy – and as a result, rural customers might feel left out.
But drones might be flying into rural Ireland soon, hoping to address logistical issues with traditional last-mile deliveries while providing a more profitable solution to businesses.
Etienne Louvet, the founder and CEO of Iona Drones, a London-based start-up that recently established an Irish corporate entity, tells SiliconRepublic.com that his operation will start functioning in rural areas in Ireland as early as the end of 2025. Iona Drones is developing autonomous delivery networks for rural areas using drones and robotics, with the aim of improving costs and reducing emissions for logistic companies.
Drones and delivery
Drones, which were previously mostly used for surveillance and monitoring, have slowly expanded their use cases in recent years, delivering vital resources to hospitals, assisting in wildfire prevention or transporting small packages.
Anticipating widespread drone usage, Dublin City Council, in collaboration with Maynooth University and Lero – the Research Ireland Centre for Software, recently launched a two-year-long feasibility study to prepare Dublin and other European cities for increased unmanned aviation traffic.
Elsewhere, in some US locations, companies like Amazon already have drone delivery systems deployed, while courier company DHL launched drones in China as early as 2019.
While in a first for Ireland, Manna Drone Delivery kicked off a test run in Dublin’s Blanchardstown, Dublin earlier this year, delivering thousands of packages – albeit within a limited 3km radius.
However, effective last-mile deliveries hold a much more pivotal role in rural areas. Louvet tells SiliconRepublic.com that Iona drones’ business model is “developing a complementary solution to a delivery van”.
Delivery vans, Louvet explains, are efficient when there’s a higher volume density of packages, however, “as soon as you have a lower density of population, you have a lower density of delivery points,” which he says would run businesses a loss.
“So of course they’re trying to reduce rural deliveries as much as possible.”
Iona Drones, which positions itself as the middle person, similar to other logistics providers, charges businesses an upfront charge and a percentage of the revenue businesses generate from delivering parcels. But Louvet claims that Iona Drones’ model will cut delivery costs, making operations “10 times less expensive”.
Overcoming logistical issues
The three-year-old Iona Drones is still “very R&D intensive,” but Louvet is confident that concerns like weather, range and natural disturbances won’t be an issue for his company’s drones.
The company’s unique selling point, according to Louvet, is a tilt rotor and a three-metre long wingspan that enables the drone to glide over long distances, “drastically” increasing the range, according to Louvet. “We can go to 100km plus, even 300km if you wanted to,” he says.
Gliding also increases the drone’s energy efficiency, adding to the overall cost effectiveness of drones, in comparison to traditional road transport. Other issues like wind and gusts can be fixed through software programming.
“If it’s just like normal rain, it’s not going to be a problem.” However, a “complete shower” will be an issue, but Louvet says that the “entire economy is basically stuck” in that case.
And the altitude at which a drone flies can be adapted to that of a bird, he says. However, that being said, they can see a bird coming, he adds, laughing.
“Most birds will never miss a three-metre wingspan drone coming their way.”
However, pilots need to be trained, which Iona Drones is currently looking into. “I don’t think that I will find many people, specifically in Ireland, in drones,” says Louvet. “But the thing is, I don’t find many people anywhere else in drones.
“We realised that no matter what we do, we need to train the people.”
The company is working with an agency at Future Mobility Campus Ireland to recruit pilots and engineers, Louvet says.
“We just launched a recruitment process with an agency there [in Shannon] and we will most likely train other types of engineers like software engineers.”
With all that in place, Iona Drones hopes to be operating fully in Ireland, starting with Shannon, as early as late 2025.
“From Q1 (2025), we will produce the new version of the drone in Ireland… and from Q4 we should be live in the first locations – most likely around Shannon.”
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