Innovative Italian startup, offering a smart capsule system to transport medical products by drones, is open for different kinds of cooperation agreements with industrial partners in EU

Italian innovative startup born in 2017, specialised in the design and production of technology and engineering consulting for the emergency healthcare sector. The company offers a smart capsule system to safely and efficiently transport highly valuable and perishable medical products through drones. The Capsule features a full autonomous flight & control intelligence thanks to which it can be operated by anyone with in complete safety with no need of drone flight license in full compliance with applicable regulations to perform delivery missions in an autonomous way. The system is based on an intuitive, proprietary and effective software, easy to use by the medical staff. The core of the technology, the smart capsule, has been patented. The company drones deliver critical blood and medicine exactly where and when needed 24/7. The solution performs transportation on short distances, proving a reduction on delivery time by up to 80% and, on medium distances, up to 50%. This reflects into important savings in direct and indirect costs of healthcare systems. in October 2018 the company performed the first autonomous flights supervised by medical personnel of an important Tuscan hospital and in another northern Italian town. Other demonstrations were given during public events with great national media coverage. During these events, the system (the smart capsule on the drone) covered distances of 7.5 km with a payload of 4.5 kg, and performed tests on the effects of transportation on human blood. Tests were carried out with a commercial DJI Matrice 600 drone, a beta version of the GUI, and the smart casing second prototype. The company also performed preliminary tests with temperature recording systems inserted into a central pouch to test the unit’s thermal stability during the flight. These validation flights gave excellent results: the prototype transported safely and automatically blood bags to destination, without alteration of blood physico-chemical properties, while correctly following all specifications, and demonstrating the outstanding benefits of the solution, such as cost and time saving, and guaranteeing high quality of the transported product. In August 2020 the company obteined authorisations from ENAC, the Italian Civil Aviation Authority, for carrying out the experimental flights in Extended Visual Line of Sight (EVLOS) mode in a dedicated area (i.e. NOTAM, Notice to AirMen). Preliminary flight experiments have been successfully carried out thanks to a collaboration with an Italian Big Pharma, a pilot customer, at their facilities in the south of Italy, where the company has an office, a drone port and outdoor space for experiments. At this point the company would like to increase the number of hospitals reached by penetrating the service providers allowing the scale up at national and international level in Europe. The company is planning to start commercialization in Italy, its most known market, by addressing medical transportation operators that serve the public healthcare sector. In Northern Europe blood transportation costs are very high (>€300,000/year per hospital), so the company is really interested in finding partners (service providers for hospitals) from Germany, Spain France, United Kingdom, Austria and Switzerland. The company is looking for different kind of collaborations, that could vary from Joint Venture Agreement, to License Agreement, Outsourcing Agreement or Subcontracting.