senseFly Brand Guidelines: The EPFL Flying-Wing Spin-Off Behind the eBee

Insect flight, an autopilot and a start-up at the gates of EPFL.

senseFly grew out of research at the EPFL, the Swiss federal institute of technology in Lausanne. In 2012 the school said the technology dated back to 2001, when robotics researchers in its Laboratory of Intelligent Systems began studying how flying insects control and steer their flight. That work produced an autopilot, and “by 2008 it was included in an ultra-light flying wing,” Jean-Christophe Zufferey, whom EPFL named as senseFly’s founder and chief executive, said at the time. The Swiss start-up news site startupticker.ch gives the company’s founding year as 2009.

EPFL described the start-up as installed “at the gates” of the school, and its drone as the result of six years of research in the laboratory: a small flying wing with an autopilot and a miniature high-definition camera, used to map construction sites, landscapes, towns and mines, to monitor industrial sites and to manage farmland. Its partner in software was Pix4D, another EPFL spin-off, whose programs assemble hundreds of aerial photographs into geo-referenced 3D images of the ground.

In July 2012 the French company Parrot, then known for wireless accessories for mobile phones and already selling consumer drones, bought a majority share in senseFly and a minority stake in Pix4D, EPFL reported. Robohub wrote in October 2012 that the first product from that partnership was the eBee, a flying wing with a span of about three feet, aimed at surveyors and mining professionals who wanted to take their own aerial photographs and turn them into orthomosaic maps and 3D models.

The eBee range, Parrot and the sale to AgEagle.

The eBee name became the core of the company. By 2021, startupticker.ch reported, senseFly employed about 90 people in Lausanne and developed and produced a proprietary line of eBee-branded fixed-wing drones for professional users in agriculture, government, engineering and construction. It had by then become a wholly owned subsidiary of Parrot, while the team stayed in Lausanne.

The range later took in government models. In March 2022 AgEagle said the eBee TAC had been added to the US Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue UAS Cleared List under its Blue sUAS 2.0 process, quoting the unit’s statement that it was the first approved drone added under that process. The announcement was datelined both Wichita and Lausanne, and AgEagle said the eBee had by then been used by US military units for four years. The current line, as listed by its owner in 2026, includes the eBee X mapping drone, the eBee TAC and the eBee VISION, along with a family of eBee cameras for photogrammetry, thermal and multispectral work. EagleNXT presents the eBee X as a mapping drone that takes interchangeable cameras, from standard colour photography and 3D models to multispectral and thermal imaging, with optional RTK and PPK positioning.

Parrot sold the business in 2021. In October that year Parrot and AgEagle Aerial Systems, a drone, sensor and software company from Wichita, Kansas, announced a definitive agreement, and Parrot said it completed the sale of senseFly — both the Swiss company senseFly SA and its American arm, senseFly Inc. — on 19 October 2021. Parrot said it would now concentrate on its own professional quadcopters, the ANAFI range, and on Pix4D’s software. In the same release it described itself as a group founded in 1994 by Henri Seydoux that designs and develops its products in Europe, mainly in Paris, where it is based, and in Switzerland. startupticker.ch reported that senseFly’s chief executive, Gilles Labossiere, was to step down at the closing, and that Michael O’Sullivan, its head of global marketing, would become managing director of the new AgEagle subsidiary.

How drone makers present themselves.

Commercial drone makers sell instruments, not toys, and their pictures show it. The aircraft usually appear in the field rather than in a studio: a fixed-wing or vertical take-off airframe, often in white with a bright orange or another high-visibility colour, standing on gravel at a quarry edge, on a farm track or beside a pipeline before launch. The landscape matters as much as the machine, because the product being sold is the map, the model or the measurement that comes back.

Inspection and delivery makers have their own set pieces. Caged inspection drones are photographed inside boiler rooms, tanks, sewers and mines, lit only by their own lamps, with the protective frame as the defining shape. Delivery companies show a parcel being lowered on a line or dropped by a small parachute into a garden, a hospital yard or a field, so that the service, rather than the aircraft, carries the story.

People appear mainly as operators. A typical scene is a field crew in high-visibility clothing holding a tablet or a ground station, planning a flight or checking images on screen, with the drone small in the background. Brochures and websites follow the same order: the industry first, such as surveying, construction, mining, agriculture or public safety, then the workflow, then the hardware, with software screenshots and sample maps placed beside the aircraft.

Much of the industry still meets in person. Trade fairs such as Commercial UAV Expo and XPONENTIAL bring makers, software firms and operators to the same exhibition halls, where stands show airframes on plinths next to large screens of point clouds and orthophotos. In this guide we record what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From a Swiss brand to a product range inside EagleNXT.

Under AgEagle the senseFly name receded. DroneDJ reported in August 2022 that AgEagle, which began as an agricultural drone company in Kansas, had bought both senseFly and the sensor maker MicaSense from Parrot in 2021 as it set out to become a full-stack drone company, and that it had since settled its remaining payments for both. In September 2025 AgEagle Aerial Systems rebranded and began operating under the name EagleNXT, Commercial UAV News reported, with chief executive Bill Irby saying the company would “honor our legacy while embracing our future.”

Today the old sensefly.com address forwards, by way of AgEagle’s former site, to EagleNXT’s, where the drones are sold as the eBee Series rather than under the senseFly name. EagleNXT gives its headquarters as Allen, Texas, and lists a regional office at Cheseaux-sur-Lausanne in Switzerland. Its site says the subsidiary senseFly SA holds ISO 9001:2015 certification covering the design, manufacturing, sales and after-sales of aerial imaging technology. senseFly SA continues as a Swiss subsidiary of EagleNXT, while the public-facing brand is now EagleNXT and its eBee range.

For a design guide, senseFly shows how a laboratory project can produce a product name strong enough to outlast the company name it launched under. Compare Parrot, its majority and then sole owner from 2012 to 2021, and Wingtra, another Swiss maker of mapping drones. For this guide we use slate blue, wing white and a field green with a geometric sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep senseFly’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.