Lily Robotics, Inc. was an American robotics company headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 2013 in Berkeley, California by UC Berkeley alums Antoine Balaresque and Henry Bradlow, with the goal of designing and manufacturing a quadcopter camera drone. According to Crunchbase, the company raised $1m in seed funding in April 2014.
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History
Lily was founded in the basement of a Berkeley robotics lab by CEO Antoine Balaresque and CTO Henry Bradlow. As reported to Forbes, the idea for Lily's first product, the Lily Camera, came to be in Summer 2013 after Balaresque returned from a family trip to Yosemite and noticed that his mother was missing from all of the photos because she was behind the camera.
The founders began building the team after securing a seed round in Spring 2014 led by Shana Fisher and SV Angel. Since Summer 2015, the company has expanded to employ approximately 50 individuals.
In May 2015, the company announced the Lily Camera, an autonomous flying camera that combines GPS and computer vision technology to record stills and video of users autonomously via a wearable tracking device. The company received approximately 60 thousand pre-orders for the device, collecting over 34 million dollars in pre-sale revenue. International Business Times compared the new startup to the Zano, a similar camera-drone project which was still in development at the time but later failed and closed down.
In December 2015, Lily reportedly closed a Series A funding round of $14m, led by Spark Capital. Other notable Lily investors are the Stanford StartX fund, the DJ Steve Aoki and the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana. Additionally, the founders announced that the original February 2016 release date for pre-order customers would be delayed until Summer 2016.
Closure and lawsuit
On 12 January 2017, around 4AM GMT, Lily sent an email to all their customers notifying them that the camera could not be produced and they would receive a refund. The company closed owing $34 million.
On the same day, the District Attorney of San Francisco filed a lawsuit against Lily alleging that the startup intentionally deceived customers. According to the lawsuit, Lily faked demonstration videos using products from other manufacturers. In late January 2017 the San Francisco police, seeking evidence for criminal charges related to the company's failure, conducted a raid of the Lily Robotics offices.
The Lily Camera
Lily's flagship product, the Lily Camera, was a quadcopter drone designed to be used as a self-propelled camera. The device has a waterproof rating of IP67. It is built out of black polycarbonate and brushed aluminum, and weighs approximately 2.8 pounds. The Lily Camera contains 7 types of sensors: an accelerometer, a three-axis gyroscope, a magnetometer, a Barometer, GPS, a front-facing camera, and a bottom-facing camera.
The camera captures video with 1080p resolution at 60 frames per second, and 720p at 120 frames per second. The device uses digital image stabilization in lieu of a mechanical gimbal. Using a wearable tracking device, the technology combines GPS and computer vision to locate the user and optically track their features. An internal dampening mechanism facilitates stability alongside the digital gimbal.
Like the Lily Camera itself, the wearable tracker has a waterproof rating of IP67. The tracker contains 5 sensors: an accelerometer, a barometer, GPS, a microphone, and a small vibration motor.