It all started with a cold email.

Native Miamian Curt Lary isn’t shy about shooting his shot when it comes to his startup, drone-in-a-box company Hextronics. An active participant in Miami’s burgeoning hard tech scene, Lary one day decided to try his luck at emailing Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Founders Fund and vocal supporter of the #MiamiTech movement.

“It was a classic: ‘Hey, we’ve been bootstrapped, here are our revenue figures, here’s how many products we sell across the world, and we’re continuously growing right here in Miami,’’ Lary told Refresh Miami from Hextronics’ recently-expanded offices in Kendall.

Asparouhov responded, sharing his intrigue and interest in learning more – and saying he wanted to stop by the office to check the operation out in person.

“That day he was coming, I told everyone in the office that someone really cool was coming,” Lary recalled. “So everyone expected some guy to come in wearing a suit.”

Meanwhile, Asparouhov showed up in shorts and t-shirt, right off a run. Over avocado toast delivered from Pura Vida, he and Lary met and talked about Hextronics.

 “He said, ‘this sounds incredible – we need more of this in Miami,’ and he said he’d keep in touch,” said Lary. “Once I gave [Asparouhov] the tour, I went back into the office and everyone asked me, ‘When’s the important guy supposed to show up?’”

And who says that Miami entrepreneurs aren’t down to earth?

Fast forward to earlier this year, and many conversations with the Founders Fund team later, and the VC committed a $2 million seed round to Hextronics.

 Lary plans to leverage this capital primarily to further develop their product – refining the systems, getting processes dialed in, and creating strong certification processes for customers that come in. 

The idea is that regulation can be a headache for Hextronics’ customers, since in most jurisdictions there are restrictions around flying drones beyond the operator’s line of sight. Hextronics aims to help its customers get the relevant waiver paperwork through without having to hire a team to do it

.Hextronics’ offering – which encompasses hardware, software, and an autonomous drone battery-swapping soluton – is particularly popular with first responder organizations, as well as railway, oil, and gas companies, just to name a few.

Already, Hextronics has made significant product improvements. For instance, it used to take eight minutes for a drone to swap its batteries. Now, it only takes two minutes. “For 911 operators, being able to swap a drone battery in two minutes rather than eight really could save a life.”

The Hextronics team has also grown, with around 30 employees at the moment including a series of summer interns from the likes of Carnegie Mellon, Vanderbilt, Stanford, and local high schools. The vast majority of these employees are builders, working on a combination of design and manufacturing.

Looking forward, Lary is excited for more people to realize the capabilities of drones

.“It’s been a dream of mine to see robots existing in our normal environment,” he asserted. “And we’re making that happen.”