The ROC Blueprint: Turning Drone Docks into Recurring Revenue

In this NestGen '26 session, Achal Negi, co-founder and director of business development at FlytBase, lays out a practical blueprint for building a Remote Operations Center (ROC) business around autonomous drones. The session starts with why ROCs are becoming essential. Autonomous flights are scaling faster than the capacity to supervise them, and as drone programs move from early adopters to mainstream enterprise buyers, those customers won't hire their own pilots or apply for BVLOS waivers. They want to buy the outcome as a service, and somebody needs to supply it. Achal breaks down eight building blocks that a ROC needs beyond hardware and software: supervision models, customer dashboards, one-to-many operations, compliance logging, dock maintenance, value reporting, and the business model itself. The session covers how to structure roles from remote pilot to supervisor to customer, how to handle emergency response requests alongside scheduled missions, and where the recurring revenue actually comes from.