UK-based drone operations and data-intelligence company, StirlingX, has recently secured $11 million in seed funding, placing them in the top five percent of European technological start-ups by total seed capital raised.

Autonomous drone operations, secure data infrastructure, and sovereign data intelligence are the pillars of the company. Their goal is to provide their customers with real-time data and a dynamic understanding of their assets, helping them with critical decision making to reduce costs and mitigate risks. StirlingX serves the construction, transportation, telecommunications, defense, and manufacturing sectors of the UK.

To learn more about how the company plans to use the funds, Commercial UAV News spoke with Daniel Clarke, the company’s Chief Technical Officer.

Over the next few years, Clarke said, the company aims to expand operations geographically, and their current service offerings.

“Key milestones include expanding our BVLOS operational footprint, maturing the data intelligence platform into a fully productised, mission-critical service, and strengthening the security and resilience of the entire stack,” he explained.

Like many tech start-ups all over the world, StirlingX’s goal is to show the industry they are beyond proving themselves as a valuable tool. With this funding, they hope to scale up from that point. Their focus will turn to building upon what they are already successful at.

“This funding allows us to industrialise what we’ve already demonstrated: scaling operations, accelerating product development, and building the governance, assurance and security processes required to operate at national scale. It enables us to move faster, test more rigorously, and transition cutting-edge technology into operational use with far greater confidence.”

Some of the biggest challenges the drone industry face lies in BVLOS operations and the regulatory framework around it, operating within security requirements, and just keeping up to date with the innovations of tomorrow. StirlingX plans to address all of these with this new funding.

“The funding allows us to tackle some of the hardest challenges in the sector: scaling BVLOS operations responsibly, meeting increasingly stringent security and sovereignty requirements, and bridging the gap between fast-moving commercial drone innovation and defence-grade resilience,” Clarke told CUAV News. “It also supports deeper engagement with regulators and customers to ensure new capabilities are not just technically viable, but operationally and legally robust.”

As a service provider to critical infrastructure assets like power grids and cell towers, this funding means StirlingX can increase monitoring of these assets and provide more accurate and timely data to the customer.

“For customers like National Grid, the funding accelerates our ability to deliver large-scale, persistent monitoring of long linear assets with significantly reduced survey times, fewer site visits, and more reliable data. It also enables faster turnaround from data capture to actionable insight, helping infrastructure owners identify risks, changes and faults earlier, and make better-informed operational decisions.”

This type of work on national infrastructure, in addition to defense, will remain the focus of the company’s goals for the time being. Plans for the future entail expanding internationally as they have designed their workflows to be adaptable for international customers and to be used in other verticals.

As a signal for the future of the commercial drone space, it’s always a good sign to see start-ups receive this kind of support. Funding like this underscores the growing investor confidence in the industry and is a good example of what it takes to meaningfully scale a drone business.