Valqari Drone Delivery Network

Iowa State University and Valqari have been building a fully autonomous no-touch, two-way, medical delivery network using drones. By having autonomous point-to-point delivery, we can create sterile transportation networks that do not cause the risks of community spread of COVID like traditional testing processes and logistics networks. This would be a perfect compliment to current telehealth initiatives, while also providing a full chain of custody for controlled medicines.

Being able to immediately quarantine a patient and their essential supply chains upon a positive test or first onset of symptoms will drastically reduce community spread. By reducing early contaminations, the curve will be substantially flattened. By delivering medicine, supplies and meals to the quarantined patients, there would be significantly less need to stockpile, expose delivery drivers, or make frequent trips to the supermarket or pharmacy, helping the patient and the community. This solution can scale globally, helping people across the world.

Much of the crisis related to COVID19 is due to the fragility of the current supply chains and limitations on the current methods of logistics. The limitations in the distribution of test kits has also been a direct cause of the exponential growth in cases. This causes people to venture out to find essential items at supermarkets and pharmacies, or to their local hospital to get tested, causing significant unnecessary community spread at critical locations. This unnecessarily puts essential workers at risk. By not only quarantining infected patients, but isolating their essential supply chains as well, we can drastically reduce the possibility of cross contamination and community spread. 

Our drone network would seamlessly integrate on top of current logistics networks, so as not to reduce efficiency of current ground based transportation. 

Our technology would be able to address this pandemic and future crises all over the world preventing future unmitigated spread. This pandemic has affected those around the world and our solution works in both the most rural and the most developed countries. Our solution emboldens hospitals and clinic networks, but also rural populations with little to no infrastructure, such as in areas of Africa or many Canadian First Nations.

When a doctor advises a person to receive testing, a drone would deliver their sample to their local Valqari station or their personal drone mailbox, which is fitted with proprietary sterilization methods to not contaminate the receptacle or subsequent parcel deliveries. The drone would then be scheduled to retrieve the sample from the Valqari station to be delivered to a local laboratory where it would be tested. 

If the test comes back positive, the person would be notified and quarantined. For the next 14 days, we would initiate scheduled deliveries of food and medicines by drone so the quarantined person has no need to leave their home, further spreading COVID. This would significantly reduce community spread and still provide adequate care for at risk people that are quarantined, benefitting both the patient and the greater community. 

We are are building the entire delivery network including; autonomous drones that meet all FAA requirements, the receptacles (both community stations and personal mailboxes) which adhere to all US postal codes, the packaging for sample safety in accordance with all CDC hazmat transportation guidelines, the software required for completely autonomous flight and routing, and the data management systems in line with current HIPAA guidelines.

Our solution benefits many, including rural communities globally and populations with little to no infrastructure. Our drone solution receives pharmaceuticals or test kits, and sends samples to laboratories, fully autonomously, freeing rural nurses to perform care instead of logistical tasks. We have met with UNICEF to learn that a lack of adequate healthcare access is a primary concern of many of the indigenous and rural populations they are seeking to support. Rural healthcare worker workload is a primary concern.  

In conjunction with telehealth, our network would provide medical access to many that are currently lacking medical care in their communities, while also reducing the cost of that care. 

Rural hospital networks tend to be underfunded, and covering large distances to deliver medicines, samples, and other critical items is expensive. We have met with several and all employ fleets of runners and expensive couriers.

By driving down the costs of the logistics, it in turn reduces massive cost drivers for many cases such as in-home elderly care, monitored quarantining, and mass testing. Infirm, elderly, and immobile patients would have the most to gain as the costs of in-home care can be prohibitive. This is a problem we have found exists worldwide.

Drones are being used across the world to combat the dangers of COVID, from spraying disinfectant, monitoring social distancing, or even delivering crucial supplies. 

We are fully automating that delivery process so that fewer essential personnel need to be put at risk, while also strengthening the very strained supply chains. In doing so, we are able to provide critical care 24/7/365 to those that are most at risk from not being able to access adequate care safely. 

This solution is directly in line with the goals of the challenge, and serves the populations that need care most.

We have been granted 13 utility patents on our solution across 5 continents; primarily covering a drone delivery landing pad and the method of delivering a parcel to a landing station. 

Current models either land the drone (RigiTech, Amazon or Swoop,) or winch the package from a large height (Flirtey or Wing). Neither method provides a secure chain of custody required for scheduled medications or medical supply chains. An auditable chain of custody is the single most important factor when delivering controlled medications. We have the only solution that can verify chain of custody for the entire delivery. 

Furthermore, neither provide the capability for reverse logistics, or being able to send something back by drone, which is needed for test kits to be picked up to be taken to a lab. Both also require some functional flight operations certification for the nursing staff which reduces their capabilities to provide care. Removing the nurses from the flight operations is critical for optimizing care, which our landing stations provide the means to do. 

We have the only fully autonomous logistics network in development connecting hospitals, pharmacies, clinic networks and homes, all in one drone network. 

Our solution covers a few key technologies. 

The primary technology is fully autonomous drones. This includes technology in aerodynamics and flight performance, computer vision and vision based processing, machine learning and AI data processing, battery capabilities, communications hardware and protocols (including 5G), authentication protocols, as well as GPS/RTK and other positioning technologies.

We also work within materials science and thermal properties for the cold chain storage applications of antibiotic deliveries. 

Our Demonstration with Sprint in September of 2019

We have built three iterations of this technology so far to find the best possible solution using our technology to meet our goals. This third iteration of development is ready to be deployed around the world. 

We will be conducting a full scale pilot this summer with our research partners, Iowa State University. In collaboration with their extensive background in aerospace engineering and the full support of the State of Iowa, we will be showcasing the full capabilities of drone delivery. 

While regulatorily speaking, there are efforts being conducted currently to proliferate the market, drone delivery has been a proven technology that is currently being implemented safely by many companies. It has been shown to work effectively and efficiently in many UNICEF pioneered operations including Malawi, Mozambique and Vanuatu. We have also seen many large companies enter the market for customer delivery in Virginia with Wing, in Reno with Flirtey, and several other US locations.

We have a very ambitious theory of change that relies on the properties of emergence. Our input is the same medical drone delivery network, and by utilizing the ambient capabilities we can use third and fourth layer emergent properties to provide novel solutions. 

For instance, by delivery to an assisted living community, providing  regularly scheduled medicines, meals, and medical supplies, we can drastically reduce the cost of in-home care for a vast majority of patients. The healthcare worker can then focus more on patient needs rather than logistics and non-medical care. 

The next layer we gain from analyzing the data of each user by utilizing machine learning, which will optimize the network. For instance, if one patient always retrieves a meal within 10 minutes of delivery, and we find a meal hasn't been retrieved in 20 minutes, we can call their phone to make contact to assure everything is alright. If the call is unanswered, we can send someone to do a wellness check. 

By mapping several of these communities over time, we can forecast specific needs in particular populations to extrapolate any deviations, such as a spike in specific care needs, for example an increase in antibiotic treatment, we can see broader trends in bacterial resistance increase or new outbreaks amongst a specific community. We can also forecast delivery of specific drugs for a given area and determine in advance where backlogs in the supply chain will occur. We can then provide data to pharmacies to better manage inventory and drug companies to allow more accurate production modeling. 

There is also a concern of the $300B in unfulfilled pharmaceuticals domestically every year. By providing an effortless means of delivery, those costs would no longer be carried by the drug companies and the pharmacies. If even 10% of that was able to be carried to cost savings to the patient, it would create a feedback loop of lower cost leading to more fulfillment, leading to lower cost, etc. This would effectively revolutionize the pharmaceutical model long term, all while making healthcare more accessible and affordable across the world. 

We will be conducting our pilot this summer at Iowa State University in collaboration with corporate sponsors/customers to debut our fully autonomous technology, so we are approximately two months from serving our first customers. 

In one year, we expect to have 1550 boxes deployed based on current LOIs and POs. Each box will be deployed to a rural village or city with sizes ranging from a few hundred people to a couple thousand people (our models estimate an average of 750 people per village based on our research.) This would allow us to serve up to one million of the most at risk people in the world. 

In five years, based on many key studies, the drone delivery market is expected to be over $125b USD. If that trajectory proves correct, we expect to serve several tens of millions of people within five years. These would be people who are in very remote areas with little to no infrastructure, as well as the people in very developed parts of the world as the drone market proliferates. 

We have signed LOIs and POs to provide care in Northern Canada, remote parts of the Australian Outback, rural villages in India and rural residents in the US within the next 12 months. 

Our goal is to create a means for people to have better access to healthcare, better access to meals, and better access to essential items. Many times we see that when the supply chain breaks down, it is when people need access most. Having a completely autonomous system that bolsters the current logistics networks would mitigate much of those stress points in the system. 

We will be launching our large multi-user landing stations this summer along with our fully autonomous end-to-end delivery system. This technology was designed to be highly repeatable so as not to have one-off solutions. That way we can implement the exact same model wherever this solution is needed, without adjustments. It has been designed to work in the frigid temperatures of Northern Canada as well as the intense heat of of the Australian Outback. The only difference from location to location would be choosing which drone models from our fleet would be most optimal for the distance and payload for that specific use case. We have a multitude of drones in our fleet that have already been integrated with our system so that is already resolved. 

The largest barrier is currently federal aviation regulations in each country, however we are included in the NASA Advanced Air Mobility Working Group and other consortiums to help develop the legal frameworks. This will help us guide the process in the correct direction. We have began the waiver application for our upcoming use cases in the respective countries to begin pilot trials for each application. 

This will limit full scalability in the next 12-15 months in the developed world, but there are much more feasible use cases to pilot during that time in much of the world; especially in Africa, India, and other areas with limited to no infrastructure. We already have enough in our pipeline during that time frame to generate substantial revenue, as well as prove out the various use cases. 

The technology is already developed and tested so that is not a current obstacle. We have also seen a significant cultural shift in acceptance of drone delivery over the past three years so the obstacle on perception has already been overcome. 

We have been meeting with high level representatives and officials within Transport Canada, the FAA, CASA, EASA, ECAC, JAA and the ICAO. We are very pleased with the planning and execution they have done so far to create a more drone friendly aviation framework, and we are in line with our timeline to match theirs. They have made considerable progress and will be implementing the Unmanned Traffic Management systems (UTMs) over the next 12 months. Once that is complete, the airspace will be commercially viable based on all of our conversations with them. 

The regulatory bodies are looking to implement drone operations safely as to not set the industry back by having incomplete communication and safety measures in place. By continuing conversations with them and keeping them aware of our progress, we believe that they will see the need for end point infrastructure following the UTM implementation. 

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We have 13 full time staff and two part time. The two co-founders as CEO and COO. We have one administrative person, and one Director of Strategic Partnerships handling business development, one drone pilot, and the remaining 9 are engineering staff covering mechanical, software, electrical and embedded systems. 

We also have a part time CFO and manufacturing advisor. 

We also have a contracted legal team (general counsel and IP counsel), accountant, regulatory advisory, third party administrative oversight person, and marketing firm for as needed engagements. 

The founding team, Ryan and Alex, have an extensive background working together building multi-million dollar companies for the last ten years. Four of their companies are at least ten years old and still operating, each generating at least a million dollars each year, and employing 42 people across all four. They also invented this technology and have 13 of the first drone delivery patents in the world dating back to January 2, 2014. Ryan's MBA, economics degree, and special operations background give him a unique perspective of best business practices and strategic thinking to find gaps in the market. Being an Army Ranger taught him out of the box mindset to solve nearly impossible tasks with minimal resources. Alex has an extensive entrepreneurial and design background.

Geoff Graves, our Director of Partnerships and Business Development oversaw and planned the first medical drone delivery for UNICEF in Vanuatu. He also has extensive flight operations planning and logistics experience. 

Our engineering team was hand selected for being the best in their class and for having some other key skill-set to bring to the team. For instance our lead software engineer also has military aircraft maintenance experience from the Air Force. Our mechanical engineer is also a part 107 drone pilot. This gives our team a very insightful and effective perspective on solving novel problems. 

We are also currently adding a medical advisor, and an advisor with a traditional logistics network background to our advisory board to expand that perspective further. 

We are currently partnered with Iowa State University to test and pilot our full medical drone delivery network this summer along with collaboration and sponsored research to further develop our systems. 

We are partnered with Sprint and Ericsson to develop telecom and connectivity solutions, specifically for our remote deliveries to maintain full communication capabilities through the flight. We also submitted several federal proposals as a joint team to provide drone delivery for various government agencies.

We graduated from the CDL 2019/20 Supply Chain Cohort which has helped us secure several Canadian partnerships to extend operations across Canada. We are working on two separate COVID response consortiums in Canada. 

We are partnered with 12 drone manufacturers to integrate a multitude of airframes with different flight capabilities. Some carry large payloads short distance, some are built for medium payloads and medium distance but have long flight times and the quickest rechargeability. Some are built for extremely long duration and distance flights to connect the far corners of the network. This gives us several options to choose the best craft for each flight. 

We are also partnered with autonomous software and landing companies, unmanned traffic management companies, telehealth companies and logistics network operators. This gives us the capabilities through our partner network to provide a full suite of capabilities to ensure we meet all regulatory frameworks and the needs of our customers simultaneously.

We also are in several working groups to provide rapid solutions for COVID, the economy and other current crises. 

We have multiple ways to provide value and generate revenue.

Our first revenue stream is as a hardware OEM. By providing the end point infrastructure, such as our medical drone delivery station, to other drone operators, we can enhance any drone logistics network to a full point-to-point delivery operation. Our primary customers for this are drone network operators, including third party operators and corporations looking to internally develop a drone network. 

Our second revenue stream compliments the first one in providing software related to our infrastructure for other providers' drone delivery networks. This software includes landing software, deconfliction and scheduling software, and other ancillary software options to enhance the use of our infrastructure. This software is billed monthly and provides monthly recurring revenues.

Our third revenue stream is on providing the entire end-to-end drone delivery service. This revenue stream will begin in Q4 2020. We have began discussions with many companies interested in being service customers when we debut, including large campus hospitals, governments, and NGOs. This revenue stream is expected to be the largest share of the gross revenues beginning in 2022. 

The fourth revenue stream is to monetize the data, both as raw data and also refined data. The data is collected through our sensor package within the infrastructure. This data includes; traffic data, microclimate mapping and data (customers include state and local governments); fleet management data, demand forecasting and inventory management data (customers include last mile delivery companies and the restaurants/stores/pharmacies serving that market.)

Our path to sustainability will be through a combination of grants, sales and service revenues, and investment capital. 

We have applied for 11 grants already through our partnership with Iowa State University which we have discussed expanding to develop further use cases together and apply for many more grants. This has recently started so it will be some time before we get a decision.

We currently have a signed purchase order and multiple LOIs that will convert following our successful pilot in Iowa. The revenue from those will make us highly profitable, but we would look to grow our capabilities and capacities by reinvesting much of the initial profit. We will be able to meet an exponentially growing demand by repeating the exact same model. The product we are launching this summer was designed to be highly repeatable, highly manufacturable with minimal tooling, and with low cost of ownership. We will be providing the hardware for integration beginning July, as well as our own delivery service starting next year to expand our abilities to meet customer needs. 

We are also raising capital through investors to cover the overhead and operating capital needs. We are expecting to close the last tranche of our seed round in the next two months giving us enough runway to finalize our technology and successfully debut it this summer at ISU. 

Current revenues under contract will make us profitable next year, and provide more than enough capital to cover the expenses once completed.

We are applying because Solve can assist our efforts in several ways.

We need independent validation and evaluation of data from trials, which will in turn help our regulatory efforts. Having a mentor's assistance in overcoming regulatory hurdles would be extremely helpful. Much of the framework of the legal requirements for drones to operate on a mainstream level is still in its infancy and we would like to work with Solve's network to have data-backed solutions to provide legislators. With Valqari having demand in so many countries already, having a research backed template would speed up the regulatory process. We see much of the value is in jointly creating the backbone of that framework. 

We also would like to assist in the current efforts of Solve and the UN using our technology in upcoming and ongoing humanitarian projects providing remote medical delivery and pandemic response. We see tremendous value in working with Solve to scale our project to help as many people in need as possible. 

Our goal is to scale our technologies globally to provide sustainable healthcare access for as many people as we can, ideally focusing on those that have inconsistent access currently. We want to provide the physical component to telehealth and allow for much greater rates of healthcare access while driving down the costs of care. Having expert mentors that have worked in logistics, healthcare, and AI amongst others would be vastly helpful. We also would seek facilitation or introductions in pilot markets and test cases as well. 

Independent monitoring and evaluation would also be of tremendous help to show that the distribution model works. We would be able to provide objective data to regulators to show the means in which to implement our solution on a large scale safely. 

We could then use that joint win between Valqari and Solve to call more people to action to implement life saving technology.

We would like to partner with large university campuses, pharmacies and drug companies to provide more efficient distribution models. Developing a means for a secure and auditable chain of custody, cold chain maintenance, and direct channels of distribution would revolutionize the way patients receive pharmaceuticals. Companies with an emphasis on telehealth would be able to benefit the most from gaining a supply chain component. We are looking for pilots, strategic partnerships, and test markets. 

We would also like to partner with NGOs and government agencies to provide care more rapidly to their patients. Examples of such would be UNICEF, Gavi Alliance, The Gates Foundation, The World Food Programme, and other humanitarian organizations that can be directly impacted by our efforts. We would seek partners with current use cases where we can deploy rapidly and provide the most immediate impact. 

A partnership with MIT faculty, such as Milena Janjevic, Matthias Winkenbach, or other MIT faculty working on smart city logistics solutions to assist in validating our data and mentoring us in developing further smart city integration at Valqari would be immensely beneficial. We also would like to involve in our partnership with MIT a way to create more accurate data models and robust testing measures to further validate that data.

Valqari is uniquely qualified for the Health Security prize as our solution is almost tailor made for pandemic response. Completely touchless delivery, strengthening the medical supply chain, especially in the last mile, and the ability to isolate individual supply chains are critical to Health Security. 

It falls directly in line with the mission we have been striving to achieve for the past seven years and shows the exact reason why our technology would be critical in mitigating future pandemic impacts. The Health Security prize would bring us significantly closer to meeting that goal. 

We will also use the prize to further develop our solution to meet a greater number of patient needs. We can accelerate our speed to market by deploying in areas that are currently in desperate need of a solution such as parts of Africa, remote areas in Canada, the Middle East, and Australia but are cost prohibitive currently. The prize money would adequately cover the overhead to onboard a small team in those countries, giving us the capabilities to begin operations expeditiously.

This falls in line with the healthcare and pandemic initiative by Solve, so we see a collaboration between Solve and Valqari to greatly further our joint mission of reducing pandemic impact. 

We would like to enhance the goals of Solve's efforts which in turn allow us to achieve our goals. It is a win-win for both groups, but most importantly, it is a massive win for those with limited access to healthcare. 

We see AI as a critical component of our system. We anticipate beginning our AI implementation next quarter to focus on a layered approach. For instance, by applying machine learning to various data points in the delivery chain, we will be able to optimize the fleet management of the delivery drones. We would then be able to layer in buyer demand and delivery type (ie. food, medicine, essential supplies, or standard e-commerce.) We can then forecast demand based on the AI pairing the variables with the conditions and data sets. This will be critical in optimization. 

We will be incorporating a sensor suite into our next generation of delivery stations that will further emphasize the importance of data. At full saturation, the meteorological sensors will be able to map weather data to a degree not seen before. This will allow us to implement AI for micro-climate mapping and forecasting to provide real time access to important weather data on an unprecedented level of granularity. This will add further layering to flight route planning and mapping as well as provide crucial data for other organizations such as the National Weather Service. 

We can then find nuances in the use cases, such as the one explained in an earlier section, where we can implement contingency and tertiary services based on novel findings using AI. We had used the example of a woman in an assisted living community that has regularly scheduled deliveries of meals and medicines. If historically we know she retrieves her deliveries within 10 minutes, we can use AI to measure anomalous behavior. If a delivery hasn't been retrieved by her in 20 minutes, the algorithm would trigger a wellness check.

The original use case piloted by UNICEF and overseen by our very own advisor, Geoff Graves, was to provide oxytocin and antibiotics to very remote island communities in Vanuatu. The goal was to reduce infant mortality and the mortality risk from labor to the mothers by providing critical supplies quickly by drone in an emergency. It proved to be a very cost effective solution that UNICEF has expanded into use cases such as in Africa. 

We would use our prize to advance our solution to provide full-time service to those pregnant mothers in rural infrastructure-less areas that are in need. One of the big issues in the Vanuatu and African trials for UNICEF was the nurse having to take valuable time away from care to become certified in flight operations and interact with the drone. We remove that element completely. With our system, we handle all drone interactions with our landing stations, freeing the nurse to focus on providing critical care to the pregnant mothers. 

We believe widespread implementation of this technology in remote areas will drastically reduce infant and maternal mortality. This is a big step to help women and girls globally. 

Our solution is very well tailored to be implemented by refugees, particularly impromptu settlements. Our solution could be critically important in the initial formation of refugee settlements, as it allows for streamlined logistics networks to be set up in very little time, primarily for medicines and other key health items. 

It would be essential, especially in areas that are in remote places with little to no available infrastructure, or where there are hostile forces between the refugee settlements and the main dispatch locations, which has been common in many conflict zones. The drones can fly at a safe height above the hostile forces and/or undeveloped roads to provide direct care and relief to the refugees of critical supplies and medications. It would also allow mass testing of camps, which are usually susceptible to outbreaks of infection due to the close living quarters and non-existant infrastructure. The same method we would use for COVID treatment could be used for both strategic and mass testing of refugee populations to contain and mitigate the spread of infectious disease through the settlements. 

A final bonus caveat is that once the settlement has become more established and has its own infrastructure forming, our network allows for items to be sent to the greater world by drone as well. Those items could be placed in a Valqari Landing Station to be retrieved by drone and taken to a nearby city or village, whether it be important documentation, lab samples, or any other items that could benefit from the two-way nature of our drone logistics solution. 

We believe we have an extremely innovative technology that will reduce future pandemic risks as well as disrupt traditional supply chains. We see this as the future of medicine and the future of package delivery and would like to use our technology to better society. 

The amount of humanitarian models that can be implemented more cost effectively, more efficiently, and easier with our technology is vast. We would like to create sustainable change to impact as many lives as possible using that grant funding. 

We are looking to start a crowdfunding raise beginning in August so we would be great candidates for the People's Prize.