Iris Automation announces today $8 million in Series A financing in support of its development of automated sensing systems for collision avoidance on behalf of airborne commercial drones. Bessemer Venture Partners (LinkedIn, Twitch) led the round and Bee Partners participated.

In 2016, Bee Partners made an early pre-seed bet on Iris, seeing the promise in the startup's extraordinarily accomplished engineering team led by CEO and co-founder Alexander Harmsen and CTO and co-founder James Howard, and in the emerging product-market fit of collision avoidance systems to enable the drone industry.

"Often founders and investors want to cut straight to the end-use cases that leverage breakthrough technologies without considering what enables those opportunities," says Garrett Goldberg, partner at Bee Partners and an Iris Automation board observer. "At the time of company inception, Alex and James understood the 'must exist' reasons for Iris' edge technology. While we're definitely excited to envision the outcomes, we're also proud of their grit getting us there."

The near-term global market for the drone industry has been estimated in excess of $100B. One limit to the fullest commercial application of drone technologies to date has been in the realm of safety, especially as regulated by government. Iris has developed a feasible guidance system for drones that can operate autonomously not only to fly but to sense and avoid -- an achievement that represents a huge new advantage in drone operations.

Iris Automation will be using the new Series A funding to expand its team of top-notch engineers that already includes Ph.D.'s in computer vision, and draws from NASA and Boeing, while scaling its technology to participate in the upcoming White House UAS Integration Pilot Projects.