A Hungarian drone start-up is seeking to challenge the market-leading China-based manufacturers that dominate international markets for heavy-duty drones used in agriculture and industrial applications.
ABZ Innovation recently announced the closing of an $8.2 million funding round to support the five-year-old company’s next growth phase, aimed at scaling production, speeding up product development and expanding in key global markets.
The company is currently building a new drone manufacturing plant next door to its current facilities in its home town of Szentendre, Hungary, co-founder and CEO Koroly Ludvigh said in an interview with DroneLife. Soon after construction of the new factory is completed in June, it will begin producing up to around 2,000 units annually to satisfy global demand for ABZ’s heavy-use drone products, he said.
Ludvigh said the company currently serves customers in 28 countries, with its largest customer base in the U.S., with the European Union comprising its second biggest market.
“Right now, the waiting list for our drones is uncomfortably long. And this means as well that it is not a good strategic decision to start adding new countries to the list if we cannot manufacture enough drones for those new markets,” he said.
Chinese Products Dominate Heavy-Duty Drone Market
Currently the global heavy-duty drone market, and in particular the market for drones used in agriculture, is dominated by Chinese-made products. “Two Chinese companies, DJI and XAG, produce the vast majority of drones used in agriculture worldwide,” according to a study published last September in Science.
However, with the U.S. imposing import restrictions on new China-made UAV-related products, and with other Western countries seeking to source drones produced closer to home, Ludvigh sees an expanding market for his European company.
“We are basically the only alternative to the Chinese manufacturers in this heavy-duty action drone segment,” he said.
Ludvigh said he began building drones 15 years ago, as one of the first people in Hungary to do so. He began working with ABZ Innovation’s cofounders about seven years ago to develop drones and related products for the agricultural market and similar markets. Their initial goal was to offer Hungarian farmers “a drone-based one-stop shop solution for precision agriculture,” Ludvigh said.
“Our intention was to sell drones, spraying drones mostly, and mapping drones to do trainings to offer the legal consulting what you need for your license,” he said. “But after two years of struggling with the French-made, U.S.-made, and of course Chinese-made spraying drones, we realized back then that there were just no good spraying drones available on the market at all.”
Working in collaboration with Széchenyi István University and the MIB Invest Group, Ludvigh and his team founded ABZ Innovation in 2021 and the company set out to develop and manufacture its own heavy-duty agricultural drones.
“That was our original goal, to offer a solution to farmers, which we couldn’t find on the market,” he said. “That was the reason we decided it’s time for us to design and build a spraying drone. It was obviously a very naive idea.”
After several years of prototyping, testing trials and errors, ABZ Innovation released the L10, the first 10-liter spraying drone designed and built to meet the needs of agricultural markets. The L-series drones are “suitable for all farm sizes and various crops, including arable fields, orchards, vegetables, and greenhouse shading, with optional spreading capabilities,” according to the company’s website.
“Our drones can save 50% of the plant protection chemicals and 90% of the water you need to spray those crops. And on top of that, the operating costs with these drones and the sustainability factor is also on another level compared to an old-school tractor-based solution,” Ludvigh said.
Based on the success of the launch its initial line of agricultural drones, the company began developing other unmanned aerial systems that deploy similar spraying and spreading technologies, such as drones designed for power-washing the exterior of buildings.
“We have a multifunctional product family. And we are working on new use cases as well. But our main intention is to keep focusing on these relatively big drones that are actually interacting with their environment, and not only on collecting data,” Ludvigh said.
Company Faces Challenges in Global Competition
ABZ Innovation still has a long way to go before it’s able to compete toe-to-toe for a substantial share of the agricultural drone market with global market leader DJI. According to its fourth annual Agricultural Drone Industry Insight Report, which DJI presented at Brazil’s Agrishow 2025 in April of that year, at the time there were approximately 400,000 DJI agricultural drones in use in countries around the world.
Ludvigh said the biggest challenge that his company currently is facing are its limited production capabilities.
“According to our market research, which includes a lot of feedback from existing customers and potential customers we believe that the future of these big-action drones is quite clear,” he said. “Right now, we already see a crazy fast growth.”
In addition, wars, such as those in the Middle East and Ukraine, are helping to drive the global demand for heavy-duty agricultural and industrial drones made outside of China, Ludvigh said.
“With these geopolitical conflicts and contentions, we truly believe that the need for a Western player on this very sensitive industry is an absolute necessity,” he said. “The company in general is a strategically important alternative in a strategically important industry, from the Western world, for the Western world.”
More information about ABZ Innovation is available from their website.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
