Just last week, the grid-tech startup Infravision raised a $91 million Series B as it prepares to roll out its fleet of truck-transported drones designed to carry out the complex work of repairing and stringing transmission lines.
Now the Austin-based company is set to name SpaceX alum Frank Tybor as its new chief technology officer, Latitude Media has learned.
“I’m used to taking on projects that people say are crazy or impossible,” Tybor told Latitude Media. “Landing a rocket in the middle of the ocean? We were laughed at when we first presented that. Now it’s the industry standard.”
Tybor spent nearly seven years as an engineer and launch manager at billionaire Elon Musk’s private space venture.
“I was at SpaceX for quite a while for that company’s standards,” Tybor said with a laugh. “I built up a lot of launch pads, developed drone ships and landing capability, then ended up doing the back-of-the-napkin sketches for what became the company’s Mars program in Texas.”
After that, he spent a few years as the engineering chief at Energy Vault, a long-duration energy storage startup that uses gravity to produce electricity. In each role, he said, he learned the value pulling together disparate, existing technologies to meet another, newer need.
“Infravision has done a great job building up its first product. I would describe it as a Falcon 1,” he said, referring to the first-generation rocket SpaceX launched. “It works great, it can go to space, it meets the needs of the customers, but we just have a huge market ahead of us. Our technology is about scaling, going from Falcon 1 to Falcon 9, where we can hit the demand of the industry.”
Just a decade ago, both power plants and transmission lines took roughly 10 years to build. But now solar fields are built in a year, as are the data centers driving up demand for new electricity — and transmission builds have fallen behind.
For the past half century, the typical approach for stringing new lines was to fly engineers by helicopter to the different power poles. Equipping drones to do that work instead promises to dramatically lower the cost and increase the possibility of expanding the grid into areas where it’s too dangerous for people to fly.
However, that comes with the added complication of needing to lighten up those drones’ load. Heavy industry as a whole, from cranes to barges to line stringers, “is pivoting and moving from traditional cables to much more advanced lightweight ropes,” Tybor said.
“This is an industry that’s been reliant on helicopter operations, and that’s expensive, dangerous and really can’t keep pace with the demand in the world,” he said. “But even our most powerful drone isn’t as powerful as a helicopter.”
If he’s successful, Tybor’s hope is that grid construction companies will embrace Infravision’s approach as the new industry norm, in much the same way SpaceX defied previous logic about launching satellites.
“That’s the side of it for me that’s most exciting; you can have the coolest tech in the world, but unless there’s a demand for it, it’s just interesting,” he added. “We don’t need to develop crazy new technologies. We don’t need to break the laws of physics. We just need to accelerate our technologies and get these into the energy transition.”
