Meet the Rangelov brothers, the founders of Dronamics. Svilen’s background is in economics, his brother Konstantin is an aerospace engineer. Their mission? Nothing less than to disrupt aviation.
Eleven, the Bulgarian accelerator/venture fund who were Dronamics’ first investors, dubbed the Rangelov brothers “the next Wright Brothers.”
You may not yet have heard of Dronamics, but that’s because the Bulgarian startup has set its priorities straight, "Because what we do is cutting edge (it actually is rocket science!), things like updating a website come second to our mission to disrupt aviation."
The big problem the Rangelov brothers are solving
So what is the pain point that Dronamics have identified and are trying to solve? Manned air cargo has extremely low efficiency, the problem in air cargo being that the average cargo flight is half empty. The Black Swan will have the best fuel efficiency of any cargo aircraft. Svilen tells us, companies generally have a hard time predicting demand and supply and even if they manage to predict it correctly, they are still stuck with the same aircraft. For [very] small loads it makes no sense to have a human on board. Dronamics has created a prototype “The Black Swan”, which will be able to carry 350 kg of payload over a distance of 2,500 km and will thus have the best fuel efficiency of any cargo aircraft.
Dronamics’ Black Swan will open the door for same-day international delivery and bring them one step closer to fulfilling the dream to having your order delivered before the payment is processed. Their ultimate goal is for Dronamics to serve the billions of people living outside the main trade centers. Dronamics will open the door for same-day international delivery Dronamics will target developing countries first, at least until regulations in the U.S. and Europe catch up with the technology. “While ‘Black Swan’ remains the project/model name, we’ve decided to name the first commercial/serial unit ‘Pioneer One,’ Svilen tells us.
The Wright brothers built the world’s first successful airplane. We are more than confident that the Rangelov brothers – together with their small yet extremely passionate and skilled team – show the potential to follow in the Wright brothers’ footsteps to pioneer the next step in aviation.
Top 8 Finalists
We were incredibly happy to have received more than 1,600 applications for the Pioneers Challenge 2015 and it was an incredibly hard decision to select – what our jury considered – the Top 50 startups, let alone the final 8. We’d like to congratulate the entire batch of 2015 – what an incredible group of startups!The Pioneers Challenge Top 8 Finalists of 2015:
- Prometheon Pharma (Patch technology to replace needle injections)
- ascribe.io (Ownership layer of the internet)
- Cuckuu (It’s Time)
- Dronamics (Cargo drones for same-day international delivery)
- OpenDataSoft (Platform for smart transformation of data)
- Skedool.it (Smart personal assistant service powered by AIGH)
- Watly (Life.Energy.Future)
- Yott.io (You, live on TV from your phone)
Photo: © Jan Nechvile/pioneers.io; LR Photography
