Swiss UAV medical drone delivery specialist RigiTech has announced a strategic partnership with US UAV healthcare transport company Spright, aiming to extend their mutual activities across Europe and the globe.
RigiTech said the agreement calls for Arizona-based Spright to become the key operating partner of the Swiss medical drone service firm’s Eiger UAVs and operating systems in Europe. After starting out with a limited fleet of six of those craft, Spright will work with RigiTech to expand their aerial healthcare transport offer around the continent and the world beyond.
While Spright has built the base of a robust drone delivery business with medical and healthcare clients in the US, it can rely on RigiTech’s expanding and groundbreaking operations in Europe to hit the ground running.
In March, RigiTech launched regular drone delivery shuttles of medical specimens between analysis labs in France. To do so, the company relies on what it calls unprecedented approval from French regulators to operate routine beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights.
RigiTech says those daily commercial missions for its French healthcare client are the only ones of their kind in Europe thus far.
Read more: RigiTech gets first French waiver for BVLOS medical drone flights
Last November, meanwhile, RigiTech was given the green light from Swiss regulators to test BVLOS drone flights delivering patient samples to medical labs in Geneva, using routes over-flying both the city and its gigantic lake.
Those projects and others have centered on Eiger’s independent safety systems, whose deep integration into RigiTech’s cloud-based control software has been instrumental in gaining regulator authorizations.
Company CEO Adam Klaptocz believes the US experience and operational reach of Spright will help RigiTech delivery drones serve medical and healthcare clients on an increasingly wider level.
“Spright has pioneered advanced drone operations in the US with an aviation-based approach that is key to deploying safe and reliable logistics services,” said Klaptocz. “In the last year we’ve proven our drones can meet the strict requirements of European regulations and have started commercial delivery operations with select healthcare customers. It’s now time to scale. The partnership with Spright will allow us to expand our networks more quickly, as we focus our efforts on ramping up our production line and our software infrastructure.”
Read: Matternet’s Swiss medical drone delivery network ‘world’s longest’
Though RigiTech will apparently continue pursuing business development with customers on its own, it says its medical drone delivery tie-up with Spright will provide wider and deeper means of enhancing its production capabilities, and for exploring opportunities for BVLOS operations in the US, Latin America, Middle East, and Asia.
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