UltraView’s target customers are those involved in aircraft maintenance and inspection services, including operators and 3rd-party aircraft service providers. Understanding their needs and pain points will inform the product offering and messaging.
Unique Value Proposition (UVP):
Ultraview takes pride in delivering a robust, US-made inspection solution that leverages cutting-edge autonomous technology to provide safer, swifter, and more comprehensive aircraft inspections than ever before. Traditional inspection methods require highly specialized technicians to perform the inspection operations, taking anywhere from 20-200 hours to complete. In under two hours, our platform can meticulously scan a narrow-body aircraft, process a wealth of inspection data, and generate a detailed report, enabling operators to prioritize safety and efficiency.
Our completely autonomous system is designed for minimal human intervention, requiring only a simple drone launch and battery replacement. Our innovative application empowers customers with unrivaled traceability across the lifespan of their aircraft. This unprecedented level of access to historical inspection data fosters informed decision-making and continuous improvement in aircraft maintenance strategies.
Market Positioning:
Ultraview
Product Pricing Strategy:
Sales and Distribution Strategy:
Marketing and Promotion:
Develop a marketing strategy to raise awareness and generate interest. This could include content marketing, social media, email marketing, SEO, SEM, PR, and attending industry events.
Customer Success Strategy:
Develop a plan to support customers and ensure they receive maximum value from Ultraview services. This could involve a dedicated customer success team, robust customer service, and regular check-ins with customers.
Partnerships:
Identify potential partners who can help Ultraview reach more customers or provide complementary services. These could be other technology providers, maintenance providers, or industry associations.
Growth Strategy:
Plan for expansion and growth. This could involve entering new geographic markets, expanding the product line, or targeting new customer segments.
KPIs and Success Metrics:
Define key performance indicators (KPIs) and other success metrics to monitor the performance of the go-to-market strategy and adjust as necessary.
Competitive advantage:
Ultraview’s competitive advantage lies in its geographical location, custom hardware suite, and stable positioning with well-known operators.
Ultraview is the only US-based competitor that has developed its technology suite for the US military, space, and commercial Aviation.
Ultraview has designed and built a custom platform allowing us to control the software and hardware onboard fully. This is critical as we do not use any critical components from adversarial countries, where our competitors are limited because of their use of Chinese components.
Ultraview's system is purpose-built for rapid aircraft inspections, an under-served but high-vaue industry.
Our sensor suite is extremely robust to ensure data collection meets industry and OEM requirements (<1mm accuracy).
The Autonomous Flight Path of the drone allows even entry-level drone users to conduct an inspection of any size aircraft.
US-made, compliant with DOD sourcing directives, and proprietary to Ultraview, which allows for greater control of modifying the sensor suite for the planned environments.
Operability
Ultraview’s custom pose estimation system sets us apart in operability. Unlike our primary competitor, who requires over 20 data points to initialize a flight, our system needs significantly fewer inputs, enabling a quicker and more efficient start to missions. More importantly, our use of AI allows our drones to operate in varied and dynamic environments. While the competitor’s system demands a clean and static setting with the aircraft in a specific configuration, our technology is adaptable to multiple configurations. This flexibility means our drones can continue operating without interruptions caused by environmental changes or aircraft repositioning, offering a significant advantage in practical, real-world settings.
Ingestion
The software stack we’ve developed is another core component of our competitive moat. Leveraging unique mapping tech + computer vision developed in-house, we can rapidly ingest new aircraft models and create accurate waypoint systems in just a few days. This is a stark contrast to the weeks-long process our competitors face. This capability not only demonstrates our technological superiority but also ensures that we can quickly adapt to new client requirements, providing a significant edge in responsiveness and service agility.
Systems Integration (ERP and MRP)
Solid systems integration and change management are often overlooked but critical aspects of modern MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul) innovation, and this is where Ultraview shines. Our ongoing development of integration points with prominent platforms like Concourse, Trax, Sabre, EmpowerMX, and Quantum Control is a testament to our commitment to meet and exceed customer expectations. This focus on turnkey integration caters to a pressing market need, setting us apart from competitors who have yet to prioritize this area (most are hoping to stop with a set of API endpoints, putting most of the integration burden on already overloaded IT functions within the Operators and MROs)
What are the potential future funding requirements; do you anticipate raising another round? In how many months do you expect to do that?
We're currently raising a seed which we believe will take us 12-18 months out before additional capital is required. We do anticipate taking in revenue in that window and achieving cash flow neutrality shortly thereafter but may raise additional rounds to accelerate scale, acquire competitors, or otherwise move advantageously to capture the market. See financial model for more detail.
Can you provide the details of the previous raises (when, how much, what valuation, who participated)?
This is the first capital in after the limited F&F round, which was meant only to finance further fundraising.
What do you see as the TAM? How about the actual SOM?
Looking top town, we're selling digital transformation and a tech platform into an 80B commercial MRO market, with several times that in Government and Military. There are around 24,000 commercial narrowbody aircraft that require GVI (general visual inspection) worldwide, in addition to around 13,000 military aircraft that undergo a similar process. See financial model for our base case for SOM.
What is the possible pathway to revenue or profit? What is the business model? What are the unit economics of the IaaS?
Financial model has more detail but the general approach is 2 pronged, with a distinct but similar approach for both commercial and military operations. Customer engagement generally begins with an EAP or Pilot Program, where we ingest/map the relevant aircraft types, perform sample inspections, and train MRO staff to operate the platform in our absence. After that, the model transitions to IaaS (Inspections as a Service) which combines HW, SW, and analytics into one turnkey platform that then fully replaces manual inspection, drastically reducing the time, personnel, and equipment needed to perform heavy maintenance. We believe the time savings starts at 25% and ramps to close to 75% over time, resulting in a direct, hard ROI for the end customer in less than 1 year. There are also a number of "soft" benefits including avoidance of condition disagreements between the MRO and operator (or between sites within an Airline) which often result in costly contract disputes, and a novel data source for predictive maintenance, which is top of mind for every operator. In addition, our platform frees up certified inspectors, who are currently in a major labor shortage, with no clear end in sight.
There are a couple slides in our pitch deck that specifically spell out the unit economics and ROI, from a customer perspective but happy to run additional models as needed.
Government capture we believe follows a similar process and are pursuing a bottoms up (base-specific) and top down (branch specific) strategy for the Air Force and USN. We believe partnership with primes will also be critical and have key relationships at several that may be useful channel partners to accelerate growth.
It's also worth noting that while it was a long road to get to where we are today from an FAA and EASA acceptance perspective, we now believe the momentum has swung in our direction where this more efficient, safer, and less subjective method of inspecting aircraft will not only be allowed but be required as the safest, best way of accomplishing a mandatory step in the fleet maintenance lifecycle.
What is your go to market approach? What is the growth plan?
We believe this is primarily a direct sales market, B2B - high touch. We believe having talent on both the product and sales side who have existing relationships and who have sold into and deployed tech within this ecosystem is critical (we have this talent in house already).
Growth plan is 2 fold:
Organic Scale + R&D
Given the massive scale of the global aviation marketplace, we believe there is already a runway for many years of profitable growth for our primary, visual inspection replacement platform. With regulatory hurdles now in the rearview mirror, we believe this market is now open for whoever moves quickest to capture it. Outside of narrowbody, there are several significant secondary opportunities as well, including dent mapping (novel product + novel sensor package), regional and corporate aircraft, and line maintenance (moving from the hangar to the airport grounds, offering drive-up inspections (similar to de-icing), lightning strike resolution, etc.
We also believe there are other MRO use cases beyond UAV inspection that this customer base will be seeking, as the industry is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into digital transformation and new MRO capability development.
Complementary Markets and Use Cases
Outside aerospace, we believe our platform also scales well to Maritime visual inspection, infrastructure inspection, and heavy equipment inspection, with limited to no modifications to the hardware required.
We also believe our CV and AI/ML portfolio has additional use cases for condition management and predictive maintenance. If Ultraview becomes the primary source of truth for the condition of a given aircraft over time, there are both analytics and value-added service opportunities far beyond the baseline IaaS.
What is the scalability of the product? How about other uses beyond aero inspection?
See above.
Who are your competitors?
The two main ones are a french company called Donecle and a dutch company called Mainblades. Our biggest advantage vs. the competition is being US-based, with 100% compliant BOM for the HW (a strong requirement from both military and non-military customers, which has hampered both of their ability to scale). Mainblades also primarily operates on DJI hardware or on similar HW with Chinese components, which is a complete non-starter for many (most) customers. Our other differentiator is our method of ingesting new aircraft and ease of operating the platform, two primary complaints of Donecle end users (including our CTO and CPO, who is a former Donecle customer).
What is the speed of commercial development? When will it be available?
This is where Ultraview really shines as a unique opportunity. Since we were able to acquire the existing HW, SW, and IP from Rizse, we begin this journey with a close-to-ready product and platform, requiring only modest updates and polish before being customer-ready and scalable. As you'll see in our models and use-of-proceeds information, we believe only a very rapid final development push on the SW side and QA push on the HW side is required to get back onsite for customer EAP's. Also, since the planning cycle for pilots of this type often takes a month or two anyway, just in light of aircraft availability and maintenance planning, we believe we can overlap those activities to be customer-ready in early 2024 and generating revenue by mid-year.
How do you see an exit? What form and when?
We see opportunities for both longer term organic growth and diversification or a well-timed acquisition by the right MRO, prime contractor, or OEM. We believe 3-5 years will be the optimal window for evaluating and capturing the best outcome for our team and investors.
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Go-To-Market Strategy
