Hylio team attending the 2015 International Drone Expo in Los Angeles.

Hylio was birthed in a dorm room by a group of American students at the University of Texas at Austin in early 2015. In its early years, Hylio created enterprise-grade, custom UAS that served customers in a wide variety of sectors including agriculture, public and private research, logistics, and industrial surveying.

Footage from Hylio's drone delivery operations in Costa Rica in 2017.

While we didn’t make mainstream headlines for it, Hylio conducted the first beyond-line-of-sight payload deliveries by drone in Costa Rica in 2017. By late that year, after a few years of servicing multiple sectors, Hylio decided to focus solely on the agricultural industry.

From our early agricultural projects, we had seen that food producers often had no choice but to use slow, expensive, and ineffective tools because there were no alternatives. We decided to commit ourselves to making farming safer, cheaper, easier, and more productive for growers by leveraging our autonomous UAS technology.

Hylio operator deploying three drones for herbicide applications on sugar cane.

In order to ensure that our product was truly useful in the field, we decided to get our hands dirty. Between 2017 and 2020, Hylio operated primarily as a custom applicator; we got paid per acre, per application that we serviced. During this time, we were learning hard lessons from every crash, component failure, and software bug that we frustratingly encountered out under the blazing sun.

After three years of servicing, our teams had treated about 50,000 acres of a wide variety of crops including sugar cane, corn, soybeans, citrus fruits, rice, wheat, melons, and more. Through our experiences, we learned what worked and what didn’t. Those hard lessons led to the robust systems we offer today.

Hylio team performing sugar cane applications in a conflict zone in El Salvador.