ZenaDrone, a subsidiary of ZenaTech, has been making waves across the drone industry for multiple reasons. In 2024, ZenaDrone launched a trial for their IQ Nano drone, an indoor drone used for inventory management. However, it’s their Drones as Service (DaaS) business model that’s been generating is headlines of late as the company looks to establish itself as a go-to provider for businesses and government users.

ZenaTech is establishing Software as a Service (SaaS) infrastructure starting with using drones for land surveys allowing them to efficiently develop a service-oriented drone program incorporating other uses like power line inspections or power washing. The goal behind DaaS is to make drone services more accessible for organizations that could use a drone service for a current project as a one-time or pay-as-you-go type of application. This approach provides a convenient, as-needed solution that bypasses the substantial investment and intricate responsibilities of drone ownership, such as piloting, data processing, and regulatory requirements.

“We think, as a business owner, you shouldn’t have to be the one purchasing the drone solution, or the one hiring the pilots or figuring out the rules and regulations,” said Linda Montgomery, Vice President of Corporate Development at ZenaTech. “There's a lot of customers that just have an occasional use or want to be able to scale their use. We want to be the place that they go to, where they get the drone solutions that they need, whenever they need, and for the duration they want. It's a convenient, cost effective, and efficient.”

ZenaDrone plans to go beyond providing the drone and its payloads leveraging their software systems experience. While their established enterprise SaaS infrastructure provides a foundation, their DaaS package, including data analysis, represents a significant evolution that are driven by advancements in AI. These AI-powered capabilities allow for more accurate, efficient, and insightful drone operations, transforming raw data into actionable intelligence for their clients.

“We plan to utilize software applications developed by ZenaTech companies for many of our drone solutions such as for inventory management or land surveys,” Sajid Asif, Chief Technology Officer at ZenaTech, told Commercial UAV News. “We analyze the data and produce the results and analysis reports. We have integrated AI algorithms into processes to give us better results as compared to the analysis done in the past. With the help of our AI model, customers receive more accurate results, aiding in better business growth.”

ZenaDrone is currently targeting the agriculture, land surveying, and inspections industries but they don’t see that as the limit. Since announcing their strategy in November of 2024, they have produced six letters of intent and closed on two of them and have many more in the pipeline. Just this month, they announced their intention to acquire a sixth land survey company in Arizona, firmly establishing another stake in a key region of the United States.

The ZenaDrone product portfolio consists of two drones, the ZenaDrone 1000 and the IQ Series consisting of the IQ Nano and IQ Square. The ZenaDrone 1000 is their heavy lift drone which is highly customizable with any payload up to 40 kg and has a flight time of up to one hour. The IQ Nano is their compact, lightweight indoor drone that is currently on trial inside a manufacturing facility, performing barcode and RFID scanning, facility inspections, 3D mapping, and security monitoring. This drone has a flight time of up to 20 minutes and weighs 1.5kg. The IQ Square is their 41-inch square version outdoor drone for line-of-sight inspections and land surveys.

This combination of heavy-lift capabilities and precise indoor performance positions ZenaDrone to address a broad spectrum of commercial and industrial drone applications, driving operational efficiency and data-driven insights.