Swoop Aero joins World Economic Forum ‘Global Innovator’ elite

After nearly two years of successive steps to build its innovative drone delivery operations across Africa and around the world, Australia’s Swoop Aero has been ushered into to the small coterie of companies composing the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovator Community.

Swoop Aero this week revealed its entry into the elite, invitation-only cluster of companies, whose ground-breaking activities are mined to define the World Economic Forum’s vision of how innovation should be driving business and economic activities. The company said its contributions to that collective reflection will issue from its work conceiving and creating “a new layer of infrastructure making access to the skies seamless” through its diversified drone delivery operations.

Read: Oz’s Swoop Aero and UK Skyports to broaden drone delivery network in Europe, Americas 

In entering the Global Innovator Community, Melbourne-based Swoop Aero will be joining a selection of what World Economic Forum officials believe are the world’s most promising start-ups and scale-ups at the head of continued technological and business model innovation. 

“We are delighted to join the ‘Global Innovators’ community at the Forum, and to work alongside a group of like-minded, impact-driven organizations,” said Swoop Aero CEO Eric Peck. “As a Global Innovator, Swoop Aero will continue to pioneer the next giant leap in how essential supplies and services are delivered, and build a new infrastructure layer for society.” 

Read: Swoop Aero working with US, Aussie regulators on joint drone certification 

The recognition by what’s arguably the world’s most elite private business organization – known to many simply as “Davos,” site of its annual meeting of economic VIPs – comes in the wake of Swoop Aero’s recurring operational expansion, and evolving sophistication of its drone delivery network operations.

Since its founding in 2017 to explore effective and sustainable ways of transporting medication to remote areas of Australia, Swoop Aero has taken its drone delivery concept global – attracting the World Economic Forum’s attention as it has. 

The company says it was the first in the world to deliver a vaccine by drone, and has since made transport of innoculations and other medical supplies a routine part of healthcare in UK, Malawi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Australia and New Zealand. In pursuing its work, Swoop Aero has obtained approvals to operate beyond visual line of sight missions in 14 different countries.

Read: Swoop Aero gets okay in Oz for global remote drone pilot center 

Last May, the company added another degree of sophistication to its networks by obtaining authorization from Australian regulators to pilot its UAV flights over three different continents from a centralized Melbourne command center. It has also diversified the kinds of payload it delivers from medical supplies to e-commerce orders, emergency and disaster response material, and assets used by environmental conservation groups.

Verena Kuhn, head of the World Economic Forum’s Global Innovators Community says the organization has high hopes the different ways Swoop Aero is expected to influence the continued development of drone activities.

“Swoop Aero will work alongside other innovators and industry leaders to spur the advancement and acceleration of drone technology for the benefit of the global community,” Kuhn said. “Swoop Aero will also contribute to the Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of Mobility on initiatives such as Medicines from the Sky and Aerospace and Drones, and also engage globally as part of the Forum’s Fourth Industrial Revolution Network.”