On April 9, OneFly Intelligent Control (Tianjin) Co., Ltd. (referred to as OneFly) announced the completion of nearly 100 million "A+" round financing, led by AVIC Trust Co., Ltd.

Previously, OneFly has received investments from several well-known domestic capital, and this strategic financing from AVIC Capital not only marks OneFly's official promotion to the national team but also represents the first time the national level has participated in and invested in the drone field, a major event that will redefine and reshape the industry.

The core team of OneFly has been accumulating core technology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences since 2004 and was the first in the country to propose the concept of creating a "brain" for drones. After achieving the first applications of several domestic commercial drones, it was officially established in the Tianjin Development Zone in 2015.

In less than three years since its establishment, AVIC Industry actively endorsed OneFly. What is the business logic behind OneFly? After riding the super-light-speed express, where will the company choose its next battlefield?

The consumer-grade stock market is a red ocean, and the Matthew effect is obvious.

According to application fields, drones can be divided into military, commercial, and consumer-grade categories. DJI's initial explosion opened the curtain for the fierce competition in the consumer-grade market.

Two "small" things can provide a glimpse: first, many TMT giants have begun to enter the drone business, such as Qualcomm, Intel, Baidu, Xiaomi, Tencent, and other companies have invested or established drone R&D centers in recent years; second, internet elites and teams within the industry have left to start their own businesses, such as former Lenovo executive Chen Wenhui founded Feima, and former 80s postdoctoral researcher Qi Junting also officially left the system in 2015 to establish OneFly.

Many entrepreneurs are diving into the sea, but they need to be alert that the stock market is the important indicator determining the current survival space of enterprises. With the emergence of monopolies in the consumer-grade market, entrepreneurial companies must first solve the top priority issue related to survival—financing.

According to the latest statistics released by the Forward Industry Research Institute, from January to August 2017, there were 16 companies in China's drone industry that received financing a total of 17 times, with a cumulative financing of about 520 million yuan, of which 8 companies were not receiving financing for the first time.

In other words, startup teams are no longer favored by capital, and the era of "a good story + a cool PPT + a well-background team" being able to raise a lot of money has passed.

In fact, not only is it difficult for startups to raise funds, but some established companies have also failed to escape the black hole of lack of funds. In the last month of 2016, two well-known companies announced layoffs of over a hundred people, causing an uproar in the industry.

Since 2015, capital has tightened its purse strings on drone startup projects, and the consumer-grade drone market has faced dual pressures from capital and market winter.

Investment and industry experts generally believe that after the consumer-grade market has been over-consumed, the market growth rate has gradually slowed down, and the Matthew effect will be long-term.

The commercial-grade incremental market continues to accelerate, giving rise to industry unicorns.

On March 14, Zhu Tao, deputy director of the Flight Standards Division of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, disclosed at a press conference in Beijing that drones are extending from the traditional aviation field to various sectors of society, gradually transforming from entertainment flying devices to a new form of production tools involving various industries.

From toys to tools, although the difference is just a word, the market prospects are almost "half sea water, half fire." Unlike the consumer-grade market, the commercial-grade industrial chain is very long. From the perspective of enterprise division of labor, it includes flight control systems, complete machine suppliers, electronic speed control development, big data solution developers, etc.; from the application fields, it encompasses agricultural protection, power inspection, logistics distribution, etc., with many segmented fields having market prospects exceeding 10 billion yuan.

Taking the agricultural market as an example, the number of agricultural protection drones installed nationwide has reached nearly 10,000, but the number of agricultural aircraft in China accounts for only about 0.13% of the world's total agricultural aircraft; the area of agricultural aviation operations accounts for 1.70% of the arable land area, with a market scale reaching hundreds of billions.

OneFly's founder Qi Junting admitted that although the agricultural protection industry looks beautiful, the drone market still has a significant barrel effect, "the shortest board determines the overall level of the industry."

Taking battery endurance as an example, electric multi-rotor drones generally have a flight time of only about fifteen minutes. If used for agricultural protection, they also need to carry a considerable weight of agents and batteries, and actually flying for ten minutes is already considered a qualified level.

Automatic terrain detection and matching, automatic obstacle detection and classification, real-time re-planning of spraying paths, centimeter-level precision positioning and control, various technical barriers have led many companies in the industry to only gather at the downstream of the industrial chain, relying on purchasing parts and assembling machines to survive in the cracks, with entry and exit phenomena occurring almost every day. Only a few companies that can research and produce core hardware such as flight control systems and electronic speed controls, positioned upstream of the industrial chain, have the potential to grow and expand.

OneFly, which is "not short of money," is clearly in the latter category. Since 2004, OneFly's core team has begun researching drones in China and has been recognized by the world-renowned journal in the field of robotics, the "Journal of Field Robotics," as "the only one in China and one of the top ten most influential flight robot R&D and application teams globally." In 2015, OneFly was officially established, and Qi Junting chose to focus on the flight control brain as the entry point. After establishing a foothold in the agricultural protection field, the company began to fully layout the upstream and downstream chains of commercial drones.