Kyte Takes Flight in Norway

Founder Lars Erik Fagernæs shares key technical, regulatory differences

While we spend a lot of time analyzing drone delivery, we can be a tad guilty of looking too closely at the developments in America, while ignoring the robust ecosystem that’s developed overseas. Let’s put aside that solipsism for a moment, and look away from the Flytrexes and Wings of the world, and take flight to Norway. That’s where Lars Erik Fagernæs is building autonomous drone-maker Aviant, as well as its delivery-focused subsidiary Kyte. I caught up with him to see why his company left Boston and landed in Trondheim, as well as what we can learn stateside.

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Jonah Bliss: For our largely non-Norwegian audience, let’s start with the basics – what’s Kyte?

Lars Erik: Kyte is a live service for autonomous last-mile delivery with drones. Today, people are making orders of sushi, burgers and medicine that get winched down from a drone autonomously. 

JB: What was your story before founding the company, and what brought you and your team together to launch Aviant and Kyte?

LE: We started the company when Herman and I met at MIT in 2020. We had both worked with drones in the military, me in Lockheed Martin and Herman in the Norwegian armed forces, so we knew the technology was mature. When we saw the new regulations coming in Europe from 2021 that opened up for autonomous flight beyond visual line of sight in all of Europe, we knew this was the perfect timing to start a drone delivery company. 

Aviant is the name of the company while Kyte is the service for autonomous last-mile delivery. Our company started doing delivery of blood samples between hospitals and has delivered on 10 commercial contracts for this, but now all focus is on last-mile delivery. This is where the largest potential lies. 

JB: Why start with Norway, what’s the aerial ecosystem like there?

LE: We started the company in Boston, USA. However, the European regulations were a lot more developed than the American. What we currently do every day in Europe wouldn't be allowed in the USA (yet). Now it’s up to every member country of EU to implement the new drone regulations and Norway is one of the leading countries in this for four reasons: 

1. Norway is rich and the CAA actually has money and resources to handle the extra workload. 

2. The country is very sparsely populated, and we have few other aircrafts in the air at the same time. So both the ground and air risk is a lot lower than most other parts of Europe. 

3. The culture has a lot of trust in it, so it’s a lot easier to get other parties in the airspace to help out with implementing new systems required to detect them while flying. 

4. The country is heavily digitized, so it’s very easy to find documentation of population density, reception levels, high-resolution terrain data, etc… 

JB: And what about the relatively small city of Trondheim in particular?

LE: Trondheim is the Silicon Valley of Europe (or at least of Norway). It’s where our best engineering college is. So we get to recruit very good engineers, who are very passionate, and motivated for getting this to work.

JB: Who are the ideal corporate users of Kyte, and what draws them to the platform?

LE: The two ideal corporate users of Kyte are pharmacies and restaurants. For pharmacies, we can offer a delivery radius of 30 KM, reaching customers that otherwise wouldn’t go to their store. Additionally, people who require medicine have a clear value proposition from home delivery. 

Restaurants have the same value proposition, reaching people they otherwise wouldn’t. Competing services, like DoorDash, or Wolt, and Foodora in Norway, have a limited range they offer delivery for. In Norway this is 6 KM, so our drones can add 24 KM of potential customers. 

JB: What about customers, how do you serve them, and what’s the main value proposition?

LE: The two main value propositions for a customer are speed and selection. Our drones fly 60 miles per hour, above traffic, and are just sitting readily available for orders. The fastest delivery we’ve done is 6 minutes from receiving the order to delivery, 3 miles away. 

The customer also has a larger selection of goods because current alternatives limit the selection to a range of 6 KM from a restaurant or store. So we can serve several times the number of restaurants. 

JB: How do you plan to keep evolving your hardware, your service, and the territories you offer it in?

LE: The next step for our hardware is adding four additional propellers. Although we have a parachute, offering a double redundancy, we aim to have three levels of safety for the drone to crash. Drone delivery is all about reliable operations. 

We will expand with two new contracts in Sweden from January, and February 2024. One is in partnership with ICA, the largest chain of supermarkets in Sweden. We’ll also open a second Kyte base in Norway around March 2024. Then we’re aiming to expand to another country in mainland Europe within 2024, where both Spain and Switzerland are promising. 

JB: Are there any important metrics you can share about Kyte?

LE: We can deliver goods for a radius of 32 KM (20 miles), with 1.5 KG (3.3 pounds) payload, in very harsh conditions (they called it the “Viking drone” when I visited San Francisco this June.) The cost of a delivery to the customer is the same as what they would pay on DoorDash or other competing services, but we have a much better profit margin, as we automate the largest cost factor of today's last-mile options. We can get the cost of delivery down to 1$ when we get good enough volume. 

JB: What can other countries learn from the Norwegian regulatory environment?

LE: The Norwegian regulatory environment has been very transparent, open to sparring, and helpful. They’re also very upfront on what could be possible, and what is difficult to get permissions for. So I would advocate for transparency and openness for other regulatory bodies wanting an efficient operation. 

JB: Any final thoughts on the state of the delivery industry?

LE: I think the industry has suffered from several companies talking about it for too long without real progress. For example Amazon who told the world 10 years ago, without any real commercial scale yet. I fell the general perception is “drone delivery, yea heard that before. Let me know when it’s real.” However, we’re doing real, paid deliveries every weekend. And people's reactions are jaw-dropping. They invite their neighbors, friends, and sometimes grandma to show the delivery. 

So now that the EU regulations have officially opened up for drone delivery, we’ll see a lot of real progress. And fast. This is the part I’m most excited about, starting to scale up operations.