Swarm’s Second Commercial Deal Puts Its Autonomous Drones in the Mountains

Swarm, the Andorra-based lab behind Bittensor Subnet 124, has signed its second commercial project, partnering with local drone operator Mevi Dron to develop an autonomous drone for avalanche prevention at Grandvalira, Andorra’s largest ski resort.

The project moves Swarm further from being an experimental Bittensor subnet and toward becoming a commercial autonomous-drone company.

The goal is to make controlled avalanche release safer and more efficient by using autonomous aircraft to operate in high-risk mountain environments.

The deal follows Swarm’s first commercial project with German Solar Power, announced in August. That project involves developing autonomous drone surveillance for solar parks in Greece, with drones expected to detect intruders, fires, hotspots and equipment failures before returning to a docking station to recharge and resume patrols.

Swarm said this week that technical calls with German Solar Power have been completed, the scope is locked, and the first on-site test is targeted for Q1 2027.

Swarm’s business model is built around the gap between AI trained in simulation and AI that can operate reliably in the physical world. On Subnet 124, miners compete to develop autonomous flight models that are tested across procedurally generated environments. The strongest models earn emissions, while Swarm’s physical lab integrates those models with real drones, sensors and hardware.

That makes the Grandvalira project particularly relevant. Mountain autonomy is a demanding environment, with changing terrain, snow, weather and tight safety requirements. Successfully turning a model trained through Swarm’s benchmark into a reliable system for avalanche-control operations would provide a meaningful test of the subnet’s core thesis.

Swarm founder Miguel Enrile has previously argued that the biggest cost in commercial drone operations is often not the aircraft itself, but the human pilot required to operate it. Swarm is trying to turn that pilot into software, using Bittensor to create an always-on R&D network and its Andorra lab to validate the resulting models on physical hardware.

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