…The Global Leader in Robotic Wind Turbine Care

Aerones is a developer of a robotic wind technology designed to provide automated wind turbine maintenance services. The robots can perform various maintenance and repair services and can be controlled remotely. Their solution, therefore, enables wind energy businesses to reduce downtime and have a safe maintenance process.

Founding Team

We met the founders, Dainis Kruze and Janis Putrams, at the start of 2022. They have known each other for almost 20 years and graduated from Y Combinator in the winter of 2018. Dainis, as CEO is responsible for sales, strategy, and fundraising; Janus, CTO, makes the impossible work by advancing the company’s product. This is not the team’s first company together, so they know each other’s strengths and areas for improvement.

We heard several stories about how they hustle (i.e., they walked a robot across the Mexican border during Covid to demo the product to a US client, pulled off the world’s first drone jump and the list goes on) and were impressed by how much they knew about the wind energy industry — having spoken to hundreds of customers, testing their solution in the field, and constantly optimizing their robots.

Wind Turbine Market

The global wind energy market is huge! It is expected to reach $127 billion by 2027 for a 7-year CAGR of 9.3%. The increase is driven by global demand for more renewable energy (the energy sector currently contributes around 75% of global Co2 emissions) which helped fuel an increase in both the number of new wind turbines and in the size of turbines.

Over the last few years, wind turbine blades have been increasing in size as the industry scales. In 2000, the average wind turbine rotor diameter was 50m, increased to 120m by 2019, and is expected to increase to 130m for onshore and 250m for offshore wind turbines by 2035.

Not all growth is necessarily good, though, as growing blade size means that the damage will increase in severity and frequency over time. The blades tend to have a lifespan of 15 to 20 years, and as they enter year 5 of operation, they start to show significant wear and tear. If not maintained properly, the energy efficiency drops, reducing the ROI to operators.

Turbine blades can cost anywhere between $300K and $1M per blade, depending on their size. They are the turbine’s most expensive component and are crucial to revenue generation but are often neglected, and damages are discovered too late.

The most frequent damages to wind turbine blades are:

Today, the operations and maintenance market for inspection and maintenance is estimated to grow from $42bn to $77bn by 2029, a CAGR of ~7%. An excellent example of the scale can be found in Vestas’ Q2 2021 financial report, where the company provisioned extraordinary warranty costs of $175mm to account for lighting-only related damages.

When we started our due diligence, we were amazed to find that most of the inspections and repairs today are still performed by rope access technicians, such as in the picture below.

This manual type of work is extremely dangerous due to high winds, inherently not scalable, and very slow compared to robot-enabled services, which improve the downtime otherwise incurred by rope technicians.

Aerones Product and Competition

So how does it work? The team developed a ground-based winch system, with three winches anchoring a robot that is held up by a rope & pulley. The tech is protected by patents making it both very differentiated and defendable.

This video bring the solution to life → Aerones Product Demo

We could find only TWO companies offering this type of robot-enabled service, a Danish company and Aerones. However, at the time of our investment, Aerones was already working with 90 of the top 100 global wind turbine operators. Those familiar with the wind industry will appreciate the challenges of onboarding these large customers. However, loyalty and lock-in effects remain once you can demonstrate value to them. As such, we were convinced that Aerones was the market leader in the space and would be best positioned to capture future revenue from the most prominent global wind turbine operators.

The team has recently signed several multi-million-dollar contracts and is on pace to 10x revenue vs. the prior year. There is no shortage of demand for their services which include the following:

1. Internal Inspection → Blade Internal Inspection Robot

2. Leading Edge Repair → Wind Turbine Leading Edge Repair

3. Visual inspection → Wind Turbine Visual Inspection

4. Lightning protection → Lightning Protection System

5. Drainage of holes → Blade Drainage Hole Cleaning

6. Applying coatings → Blade Ice-phobic coating application

7. Tower Cleaning → Tower Cleaning

8. Blade Cleaning → Wind Turbine Blade Cleaning

9. Offshore cleaning → Offshore Wind Turbine Platform

All these services use the same delivery system, with different attachments to the robotic arm. The result is that the blade inspection, maintenance, and repair can take much less time than before, reducing downtime and increasing efficiency.

Investors

PaceVentures is excited to join Y Combinator and a great list of other investors, including Change Ventures, Metaplanet, and Future Positive (France), as backers of these ambitious Baltic founders.