SPH Engineering — the Riga-based developer behind UgCS flight planning software and a range of specialized industrial drone payloads — has launched a marketplace connecting enterprise clients with vetted operators and equipment rental partners across 38 countries. The platform launched in late May 2026 with more than 30 vetted partners covering applications most drone marketplaces don’t touch: Ground Penetrating Radar, magnetometry, bathymetry, methane detection, gamma-ray spectrometry, and other heavy industry and environmental survey use cases.

Even before this launch the drone marketplace space has been busy. Competitors include FlyGuys, DroneBase and Zeitview, and many have struggled with the ability to generate consistent deal flow. Sure, supply side (hiring qualified pilots) is easy, but the demand side is hard.

But SPH Engineering CEO Alexey Dobrovolskiy says the company is working on something different, and it could be huge for people working in heavy industry, geophysics, or environmental research.

The drone marketplace category tends to assume the job is matching a pilot to a project. FlyGuys, DroneBase, and similar platforms do that by connecting certified pilots with enterprise clients who need aerial data capture. It works well for commodity use cases such as construction progress documentation, real estate photography and standard visual inspection.

“While most of the other platforms excel at matching pilots for standard visual inspections and photogrammetry, the SPH Engineering Marketplace is focused on a narrower and more technical segment,” Dobrovolskiy told me. “Drone-based data collection that often requires sensors, trained operators, and domain expertise.”

The applications he’s describing — Ground Penetrating Radar for underground utility mapping, magnetometry for mineral exploration, bathymetry and hydrometric surveys, methane gas leakage detection, gamma-ray spectrometry, environmental monitoring — are generally hard to source through a general pilot network. With these, it’s not enough to have a certified pilot and a DJI Mavic. You need the right sensor, the right drone platform capable of carrying it, operator training in that specific sensor workflow, and domain knowledge in data processing for that application. Finding all of that locally, quickly, is a real problem that generic pilot marketplaces don’t solve well.