Picture a drone, and your first thought might be of military operations — particularly given the current headlines about Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel. 

But in startups across Israel, engineers and entrepreneurs are reimagining these flying robots for remarkably different purposes: delivering your pizza, monitoring power lines for storm damage, cleaning skyscraper windows, and even picking ripe fruit from orchard trees.

The numbers tell the story: 149 Israeli drone startups have raised a collective $118 million this year alone, according to Startup Nation Central’s market analysis. Many of these companies are focused on military applications, but a growing cohort is working to develop non-military drone technology.

“While drones are often associated with military applications, we believe that the real transformative potential lies in their civilian use,” says Yariv Bash, CEO and cofounder of drone delivery startup Flytrex.

“Drones can provide faster, more efficient and sustainable solutions for everyday logistics — be it food delivery, retail goods, medical supplies or other services,” Bash continues. 

He envisions a future where drones are as commonplace as smartphones, offering not just convenience but also environmental benefits by reducing the carbon footprint of traditional delivery methods.

The Israeli government has been supporting the development of civilian drone solutions. One examples is the Israel National Drone Initiative (INDI), a two-phase program launched in 2019 with substantial backing from the Israeli Innovation Authority. The first phase, completed in 2022, involved small cargo flights, while the current phase aims to increase payload capacity and range – potentially paving the way for heavy cargo and even passenger transport.

Throughout the country, Israeli companies are proving that drone technology can enhance rather than endanger lives. 

Here are six Israeli companies leading this transformation, each finding unique ways to harness drone technology for civilian purposes:

BladeRanger: Cleaning Robots

When it was founded in 2015, BladeRanger was targeting the solar panel market with AI-powered drones for inspection, maintenance and cleaning. 

In the years since, strategic business acquisitions and developments have led the company to cleaning the kind of infrastructure that typically endangers human workers: buildings, rooftops and windows.

The global market for glass building maintenance alone, according to the company’s analysis, is in the neighborhood of $123 billion.

The Ramat Gan-based company, which has raised $10.75 million, recently demonstrated its technology’s versatility in an unexpected arena: Germany’s railway stations. In a pilot program with Deutsche Bahn, the company’s drones successfully cleaned previously inaccessible glass roofing across all 5,400 stations — a task that had long posed safety challenges for humans.

Flytrex: Food delivery

Founded in 2013 by the above-quoted Yariv Bash, Flytrex‘s drones can carry up to 5.5 pounds of cargo, delivering everything from hot meals to groceries directly to customers’ backyards. 

These drones zoom through the skies at up to 32 mph, completing deliveries in as little as two minutes — a fraction of the 15 to 20 minutes typically required for traditional delivery methods in traffic.

With $60 million in funding, the Tel Aviv-based company has partnered with several major restaurant chains, and recently hit a major milestone: 100,000 on-demand deliveries across suburban areas in North Carolina and Texas – more than any other airborne food delivery service in the United States.

Aerial delivery isn’t just fast — in many cases it’s also more sustainable than ground delivery, reducing both road congestion and carbon emissions. With recent FAA approval for observer-free drone flights, Flytrex is hoping to expand its operations to more American suburbs.

Tevel: Fruit-picking fleets

Tevel Aerobotics Technologies’ flying robots are tackling one of agriculture’s most pressing challenges: the growing shortage of fruit pickers, which leads to an estimated $30 billion annual loss from unharvested fruit. 

Founded in 2017 in Gedera, Tevel Aerobotics Technologies has so far raised $35 million to support its development of robotic pickers, called FARs.

FARs combine sophisticated AI with precise mechanical capabilities to identify and harvest only the ripest fruit. 

Operating from a base station, each drone extends a one-meter mechanical arm to delicately twist fruit from branches, using AI to assess ripeness, identify blemishes, and determine the optimal picking technique. 

The entire system sets up in just a couple of hours, with farmers across the United States and Europe controlling their robotic workforce through a mobile app. 

Initially focused on apples, Tevel has expanded its capabilities to handle peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, and soon, avocados. Future upgrades will enable the drones to prune leaves and apply pesticides, making these flying farmers even more versatile in their agricultural duties.

Percepto: infrastructure inspection

Since its founding in 2014, Percepto has secured $122.5 million in funding for its autonomous drone solutions that monitor critical infrastructure like gas and power. 

The company’s drones can operate for 40 minutes between charges, flying at 130 feet with day-and night-vision cameras. Using AI, they identify potential hazards and malfunctions, transmitting data back to the “Drone-in-a-Box” base station for analysis or streaming insights in real time.

The effectiveness of Percepto’s technology has been particularly evident in Florida, where their drones help Florida Power & Light monitor vital infrastructure before and after hurricanes.

Percepto’s AIM platform, recognized among TIME magazine’s “100 best inventions of 2021,” has attracted a client roster including Fortune 500 companies across six continents.

Airobotics: Automated eyes in the sky

Founded in 2014 and having raised $187.75 million in the years since, Airobotics has developed a fully automated, pilotless drone platform to transform industrial site management.

The company’s platform, which earned the 2018 Global New Product Innovation Award, provides on-demand aerial data collection and analysis, enabling customers – such as mines, seaports and oil and gas facilities — to gather crucial insights without human pilots.

Expanding beyond Israel’s borders, Airobotics is building a network of autonomous drones for security, monitoring and inspection applications in the United Arab Emirates.

The company continues to advance its autonomous aerial technology from its base in Petah Tikva, even after its $15.2 million acquisition by Ondas Holdings in 2023.

Wonder Robotics: True autonomous flight

Founded in 2020, Wonder Robotics is tackling a fundamental challenge in drone operations. While many companies call their systems “unmanned,” the reality is quite different.

“The problem is that in the current technology of drone delivery, there’s nothing unmanned about unmanned systems. There’s so many people around it,” explains Or Epstein, the company’s chief business officer.

Wonder’s solution is OptiPilot, a self-contained system that gives drones true autonomy by creating what the company calls “vertical awareness.” 

The technology enables drones to operate without constant human supervision, make independent landing decisions in case of failure, and – crucially for delivery applications – ensure safe package delivery by checking for obstacles and people below.

The company, which has raised $4.5 million, is particularly focused on making drone delivery economically viable. Currently, the need for human operators makes scaling drone delivery operations prohibitively expensive. Wonder Robotics’ technology could reduce the number of people needed to operate delivery fleets, whether they’re landing at central ports, lowering packages into backyards, or delivering to moving vehicles.

Ready for a drone-filled future?

As these Israeli companies continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with civilian drone technology, the biggest hurdle may not be technical but social.

“Social acceptance of drones is part of the process,” explains Epstein. “In Europe, people are not asking what the cost of the drone for medical drone delivery is — they are asking how much noise it will make over the hospital in the middle of the city. 

“In the US, they are not asking about the noise — they are asking about whether the drone records or accumulates private information about my private property. Every social acceptance is a little bit different in a certain area, but it’s a process.”

Yet despite these varying concerns, the trajectory seems clear. As regulations evolve and autonomous flight capabilities improve, drones are set to become an increasingly common sight in our skies for good. And we hope somebody innovates a way to make them much quieter before that happens!