Dronus, a Trieste-based company that's considered one of Italy's leading players in industrial drones production, obtained a new investment from Eni Next. Eni Next is Eni's Corporate Venture Capital company. It invests in startups considered with an high growth potential, in a strategy that aims to identify and support innovative technologies for the energy transition.

Eni and Dronus defined a SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) as parte of the new investment, which builds on former R&D relations between the two Italian companies.

As an example, Eni and Dronus successfully completed the development of K3, the first drone with ATEX certification. K3 is also able to fly without any GPS signal, and to autonomously operate in industrial plants monitoring applications. Thanks to the new Eni investment, Dronus aims to promote the use of the K3 drone on a larger scale and explore further areas of technological innovation.

Drone technologies, says Dronus, will be able to further strengthen occupational safety and asset integrity capabilities, automating and digitizing inspections at operational sites. Drones can also expand any company's monitoring capacity of facilities, improving the effectiveness of environmental protection systems.

“The investment by Eni Next confirms Dronus' commitment to accelerate in drone innovation and enriches a partnership we are particularly proud of, as it once again demonstrates the ability of our unique technologies to adapt to concrete and complex, large-scale cases and to attract the attention and investment of industrial players of global scale,” commented Marco Ballerini, CEO and founder of Dronus.