Full-Stack Control for Drone Nests
Orest Pilskalns, CEO of Skyfish, on building autonomous drone infrastructure
This reveals that drone nests are less like a charger and more like a small unmanned airport, where reliability depends on every handoff between aircraft, battery, radio, sensor, firmware, and cloud software working the same way every time. Skyfish is building for inspection jobs where a missed landing or bad geotag can ruin the mission, so owning the whole system is a way to make autonomous infrastructure dependable enough for utilities, towers, and emergency response.
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Skyfish already sells a tightly integrated inspection stack, from custom boards and battery systems to RTK GPS, payloads, and Skyportal. That same integration is what lets a docked drone wake up, fly a route, return, recharge, and produce engineering grade data without an operator stitching together parts from different vendors.
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The market is splitting into different lanes. Skydio leans on autonomy and obstacle avoidance for public safety and government, DJI sets the low cost dock benchmark with Dock 2, and Percepto focuses on autonomous monitoring networks at industrial sites. Skyfish is aiming at the narrower but higher precision lane where data quality matters as much as autonomous flight.
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The business model changes if nests work. Instead of selling a drone for occasional field use, vendors can sell a permanently installed system that flies repeated missions across power lines, towers, and facilities, then layer on software and service revenue. That is why nest infrastructure is the company’s biggest expansion path beyond one time hardware sales.
The next phase of the drone market will be won by companies that turn autonomous flights into boring infrastructure. If Skyfish can make nest deployments reliable for high value inspection workflows, it moves from being a drone supplier to being part of the operating system for physical infrastructure, with much larger recurring revenue potential and stronger lock in.