Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Alexandre Borowczyk · Shearwater Aerospace · August 2026
Here is the map. Smart Flight is bought by whoever owns the aircraft and the flight hours, which puts it in front of several unrelated industries rather than one. Your own site names oil and gas, construction and energy, and the counted segments below sit inside and alongside those three. This page counts the United States, because that is the market with the deepest public register. Below are the segments where that buyer sits, the roles who sign inside each, and roughly how many companies are there.
Engineering, survey and aerial data firms
The largest counted group and the one that already flies for a living. Inspection, mapping, corridor survey and construction progress work, sold by the project, which makes endurance and route quality a direct margin line rather than a feature discussion.
Who signs: director of geospatial or remote sensing, UAS program manager, chief pilot, VP of operations, and at owner-run firms the principal.
12,000 to 14,000
US employers registered across engineering, surveying and mapping services; roughly 2,400 carry 100 or more people on the plan
Electric power and gas utilities
Long linear assets, a regulator watching the inspection interval, and a standing budget for aerial work. Flights here run beyond visual line of sight more often than in any other commercial segment, so anything that shortens the safety case tends to get a hearing.
Who signs: director of asset management, head of transmission or distribution operations, aviation services manager, VP of grid reliability.
5,000 to 6,000
US employers registered in electric power, natural gas and water utilities; roughly 1,900 at 100 or more
Pipeline and midstream operators
Small by count and unusually concentrated. Federally mandated patrol intervals over thousands of miles of right of way, which is the clearest case anywhere for range and on-station persistence, and the segment where a single account can absorb a large number of flight hours.
Who signs: director of integrity management, pipeline operations manager, aviation manager, HSE director.
900 to 1,200
US employers registered in pipeline transportation of oil, gas and refined products
Aircraft and payload manufacturers
The adjacent buyer rather than the flight-hours buyer, and the one row here that sits outside the three industries your site names. They ship the airframe and inherit every endurance complaint that comes back from the field, so software that lifts performance without a redesign is a product decision rather than an operations one. Longer sales cycle, much longer contract, and it only counts if an embedded route is one you want open.
Who signs: VP of engineering, chief technology officer, director of autonomy or flight controls, head of product.
1,500 to 1,900
US employers registered in aerospace product and parts manufacturing; roughly 700 at 100 or more
Drone-native service operators
The companies whose whole business is flying somebody else's mission. Worth being straight about a limit: pilot certificates are issued to people and companies are not separately registered anywhere public, so this group cannot be counted, only identified. That is exactly why lists sold off the shelf never reach it properly.
Who signs: founder or owner, director of flight operations, chief pilot, head of business development.
No separate register
identified one at a time from operating evidence rather than bought as a list; the difficulty is the reason the segment stays open
Public safety and emergency response
Search and rescue, fire, law enforcement and disaster response. The fastest growing use of small aircraft in the country and the one with the shortest path from demonstration to adoption, because the value shows up on the first callout. Bought on grant cycles and mutual aid agreements rather than on a fiscal year.
Who signs: UAS program coordinator, chief or deputy chief, emergency management director, sheriff or public safety director.
Not in the employer register
public bodies do not file the benefit plan records this page counts, so agencies are reached by name and by jurisdiction

Where the openings are

1
The counted rows come to between 19,400 and 23,100 registered US employers. Of those, about 5,000 carry 100 or more people in the rows where that split is published, which is the band that can fund a software line without a board conversation. In this market, first contact usually happens at a trade show or through an airframe partner, and both of those select for the operators who already move in the same circles. The rest of that number is not unqualified, it is simply unaware.
2
The buyer is a role, and it is a young one. Director of UAS operations, chief pilot, autonomy lead. Those seats are being created rather than replaced, and a newly created seat almost always buys tooling inside its first year to prove it was worth creating. A channel built on named roles catches that moment. A channel built on events hears about it a year later.
3
The commercial buyer and the manufacturer buyer are two different sales. One is buying flight hours back and reads a payback number. The other is buying a spec sheet advantage and reads a technical evaluation. They sit in different companies, answer to different pressures and cannot be reached with the same message, which is why in this category one of the two usually goes unworked.
4
Regulation is the timing signal, and it is public. Waivers, approvals and operating exemptions are matters of record, and an operator who has just won permission for a harder class of flight is an operator whose route and endurance constraints just changed. Watching several thousand companies for that moment is a mechanical job. It is also the one thing a referral channel cannot do.
Built from public federal registry data covering US employers that file a benefit plan, current to the 2024 filing year. Counts are banded deliberately and indicate scale rather than exact totals. Workforce figures use plan participants as a headcount proxy. Owner-only and very small companies are not published in this data, so these figures describe established companies with payroll rather than the whole market. Sector codes are self-reported by the companies themselves. Drone-native operators and public agencies are not covered by any equivalent register and are described rather than counted. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
enquirerconsulting.com