Sebastian Babiarz, Head of Strategic Business Development at AirMap & Co-President of GUTMA

Welcome to GUTMA’s “Meet Our Members” interview series, where every month we feature a different member. 

This month we spoke to Sebastian Babiarz, Head of Strategic Business Development at AirMap & Co-President of GUTMA. 

Introducing: Sebastian Babiarz, Head of Strategic Business Development at AirMap & Co-President of GUTMA

Sebastian Babiarz is the Head of Strategic Business Development at AirMap. His role is to identify and evaluate new business opportunities throughout Europe and to advise and collaborate with regulators and standard-making organizations as they work to build frameworks for Unmanned Traffic Management, or UTM, in the region. He is passionate about driving innovation within the mobile telecom industry, with a focus on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and the role they play in a connected society and Internet of Things.

Sebastian serves as co-president of GUTMA, where he works with drone ecosystem colleagues to foster the safe, secure and efficient integration of drones in national airspace systems. GUTMA, he says, is essential to building harmonized UTM ecosystems around the world. 

“GUTMA provides an important bridge between industry and regulators so they can build frameworks that facilitate the growth of drone technology and enable drone services at scale,” Sebastian said. “I’m proud of GUTMA’s work to accelerate the integration of the mobile network and aviation industries, which is key to drone enablement.” 

Sebastian is a founding member of GUTMA and has supported the organization since its inception. When asked about how GUTMA started, he says he was “the one who wrote the initial GUTMA declaration on a napkin (with several wine spots!).” Since then, Sebastian has served as a GUTMA board member and co-president,  deploying his expertise and leadership in service of the organization’s goals. GUTMA, 

Before coming to AirMap, Sebastian worked in the telecom industry for over twelve years, where “I saw the growing role that drones could play.” His telecom industry experience, coupled with a his passion for how new technology and automation can improve our lives, led Sebastian to AirMap. He found himself inspired by the company’s work on UTM and drone enablement. 

AirMap is the leading digital airspace and automation company serving the drone economy. AirMap connects airspace authorities, enterprise operators, and industry developers with automation software solutions for scaling safe and efficient drone operations in low-altitude airspace. AirMap’s UTM and U-space products are deployed in the Czech Republic, Japan, Singapore, Switzerland, the United States, and available in over 30 countries. In 2019, AirMap acquired Hangar Technology, an enterprise drone dataflow platform, to further accelerate enterprise drone adoption through digital automation. AirMap is committed to advancing drone enablement through global research initiatives including NASA-UTM, the European Network of U-space Demonstrators, and the U.S. DoT UAS Integration Pilot Program and UTM Pilot Program.

AirMap’s mission, Sebastian says, is to “enable safe drone use at scale and unlock the benefits drones provide to society.” This is achieved by partnering with governments, industry, research initiatives, and standards-making bodies around the world.

Sebastian predict that the drone industry’s next frontier is 5G. “5G rollout,” he says, “will make advanced drone operations, including drone delivery, industrial inspection, and public safety missions, possible at scale. The 4G networks we use now are already enabling networked e-identification and tracking, drone-in-a-box services, and live video streaming. 5G’s lower latency, additional capacity, and flexible connectivity policies will further enable a high volume of complex drone operations.”

Sebastian says he is inspired by UTM  “because it supports a wide variety of use cases that can make our world better. The robust UTM infrastructure that we’re building today will support advanced drone operations and ultimately enable Urban Air Mobility, allowing eVTOLs to safely enter low-altitude airspace at scale. There’s a lot to be excited about in our industry, and a lot of work to do to make it happen.”

AirMap, Sebastian says, is instrumental in the development and execution of projects and technologies that enable safe and scalable drone use by “ testing and supporting advanced capabilities and continuing to build the drone ecosystem.” In addition to its tools for airspace authorities, developers, and drone operators, AirMap offers two enterprise solutions: JobSight and TowerSight. 

JobSight is an end-to-end operations and data automation platform that gives DSPs and construction professionals unparalleled visibility into construction projects. With JobSight, construction companies can monitor progress, improve safety, reduce rework, and increase efficiency across their entire project life cycle. 

TowerSight is a unified system that allows towercos and MNOs to transform their tower inspections using automated drone workflows. With TowerSight, towercos and MNOs can use off-the-shelf drones to autonomously survey their assets. Using TowerSight’s high-precision flight planning, automated capture, inspection scheduling and intelligent data processing workflows, enterprises can create high-precision digital twins of their infrastructure and evolve their tower intelligence with accurate inventories of their assets. These solutions make it easy for construction and telecommunication companies to integrate drones into their workflow and collect and analyze drone capture that produces valuable business insights.

Thank you, Sebastian, for taking the time to share with us your activities and industry outlook!


Find out more about Sebastian Babiarz and his work on his LinkedIn profile here or by visiting the AirMap website here.

Feel free to contact us at GUTMA if you have any questions for any of our interviewed members. Please do visit our blog again soon for more upcoming interviews! If you are a GUTMA member who would like to be featured in our monthly ‘Meet the Members’ series, feel free to contact us here to let us know.

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