nearly 44,000 members today, Anderson says. As he wrote in a recent blog at DIY Drone, “3D Robotics was still selling mostly electronics, essentially bare boards and ‘bags of parts’ kits, much like our role models at Sparkfun and Adafruit.”
Since then, he adds, “Our mission over the past nine months has been to professionalize the company and our products, and although that’s far from done we’ve made a lot of progress. On the company side, this meant new websites, ecommerce systems, improvements in customer support (still a work in progress but we’ve shortened response times and moved to Zendesk to track issues better), and most importantly, the opening of our big new manufacturing facility in Tijuana.”
As part of its new round of funding, 3D Robotics says it plans to expand its development and deployment of advanced unmanned aircraft applications.
As an aside, one of the challenges in covering 3D Robotics is that Chris Anderson ranks among the leading journalists specializing in science and technology. Of all the media reports about the company’s new funding round, Anderson provides his own best explanation of how 3D Robotics has evolved and where it’s headed in his DIY Drones blog.
He says he’s committed to use funding from this latest round to make the DIY community even better. “As we have from the start,” he writes, “we’ll continue doing what we can to help people here help each other, following the lead of open source models from Linux to Adafruit and our original mentors at Arduino.”
But Anderson is clearly setting his sights higher.
In a presentation four months ago in San Diego, during the
