sees.ai is a British company, founded in 2018, that builds an operating system for autonomous drone flight. The software enables Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations for the inspection of critical infrastructure, allowing aircraft to fly close to assets without a pilot in visual range. Its Level-4 autonomous close-quarter inspection capability runs in real time, adapting to asset geometry, surrounding structures and changing conditions such as vegetation encroachment, rather than relying on pre-mapped environments or prior site surveys. A centralised control room platform allows several inspection operations to be managed at once, capturing secure, repeatable condition data for long-term asset management.
The company's regulatory record is notable: it was the first in the United Kingdom to obtain authorisation from the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) for routine BVLOS operations. Its technology has been deployed network-wide for electricity grid inspections across England and Wales, and the company operates in three countries - the United Kingdom, Ireland and the United States. Its work is concentrated on electricity transmission and distribution, energy and utilities, and power-grid asset management, and it works closely with major infrastructure operators including National Grid.
The engineering culture is drawn from safety-critical industries. The founders come from organisations including Apple, CERN, McLaren and multi-billion-dollar hedge funds, and the company applies the standards of high-performance, safety-critical engineering to autonomous flight systems. Technical work spans autonomous drone flight, real-time computer vision and perception, centralised remote drone control, safety-critical systems engineering and asset condition data capture.
