When a founder asks me, "What’s the regulatory process?"

Back in 2021, this was the airship we were trying to get certified. While working with Cloudline, we won a UN-funded project in Namibia. The goal was to overcome the severe annual flooding in the Zambezi region that cuts communities off from vital health and lab diagnostic services for up to 6 months at a time.

When we first spoke with the inspectors at the Namibia Civil Aviation Authority, we realized they hadn’t approved aircraft like ours before. There was no dedicated path to approval.

So over the next 6 months, a seed-stage startup was filling out the same form to fly its aircraft as a Boeing 737 would.

The regulators knew this wasn’t the most optimal process either. They just didn’t know how else to tackle it.

On our side, we hired a former ICAO auditor to work with the NCAA and streamline the approval process for small autonomous aircraft like ours. We started connecting them with their counterparts elsewhere on the continent, where the process had already been tailored for these new-age aircraft.

This is something I’ve seen again and again at GSD, across healthtech, climate tech, and agri-tech: if you’re looking to expand into these markets, you might not find a regulatory ecosystem in place. You might have to create one.