DJI
More info
- Creator
- Frank Wang (Wang Tao)
- Released
- 2006
- Type
- Drone maker
- Website
- dji.com
A Chinese company that turned the drone into a consumer product, then dominated the market so thoroughly that it became a national-security issue.
Frank Wang started out building flight controllers for RC helicopters as a student in Hong Kong and founded DJI in Shenzhen in 2006. The breakthrough was the Phantom in 2013: a ready-to-fly quadcopter with a camera and a stabilising gimbal that anyone could launch straight out of the box. The Mavic line and phone gimbals followed, and DJI took a share of the consumer drone market that no rival came close to.
Success bred suspicion. The US Commerce Department put DJI on its Entity List in 2020, citing surveillance, and several agencies grounded their own DJI fleets over data-leak fears. Meanwhile the cheap drones were used at scale in the war in Ukraine — by both sides, against the manufacturer's explicit wishes.