Lightcone Systems
Ledger
The BVLOS era is almost here
Part 108 is coming whether you're ready or not. It will unlock everything—and it will create a compliance burden that most founding teams can't carry without the right tools. Ledger is the system of record that lets you carry it.
Why right now
Under Part 107, a human has to stand in a field and watch every flight. That single rule is why drone delivery, autonomous inspection, and precision agriculture are still small. The economics of everything cap at what you can see.
BVLOS means one operator supervising a whole fleet covering a whole county. It's the difference between a tool and infrastructure—on par with trucking or the early internet. The FAA's Part 108 is in final rulemaking. This is really happening.
The Part 108 NPRM was 700+ pages. It asks for safety management systems, certificated personnel, organizational approvals, new defined roles, and recordkeeping that looks more like a regional airline than a founding team. Over 3,000 comments asked the FAA not to make it impossible for new entrants.
The compliance burden has to exist—flying autonomous aircraft is serious work. But if founders can carry it with software, they stay focused on building drone companies. If they can't, only incumbents with legal departments get to play. That's the worst possible outcome for the industry.
How Ledger works
The mental model is simple: you record what actually happened, the software checks it against the rules, it tells you where you're exposed, and when somebody asks for proof you already have the receipts.
Missions, configurations, operators, flight logs, maintenance—all in one connected system. Historical truth, not mutable present-state records.
Deterministic compliance checks against Part 107 today, with Part 108 shadow mode running alongside. Know your gaps before the rule lands.
Citation-backed findings—not AI hand-waves—tell you exactly where you're exposed and what it takes to close it. The rules are codified. The output cites the actual regulation.
Generate hashed, human-attested evidence packs you can hand to a regulator, insurer, or customer's legal team. Proof on demand, not after a fire drill.
Platform
What flew, with what, under what approved state
Connect missions to configuration snapshots, serialized component instances, operator credentials, maintenance history, and flight logs. The full picture, preserved at mission time.
Compliance proof generated from live records
Structured evidence packs for regulatory response, waiver submissions, partner diligence, and procurement reviews. Not folder exports. Not assembled from scratch under deadline.
From regulatory change to fleet action
Monitor official sources, detect meaningful updates, map obligations to your actual records, and generate citation-backed findings your team can close. Know what changed. Know what to do.
Interactive narrative
Why we built this
Delivery to rural pharmacies that costs pennies instead of dollars. Wildfire spotting that catches ignitions in the first ten minutes. Infrastructure inspections that find the bad weld before it kills anybody. Drone-as-first-responder programs that get eyes on an emergency before the first officer arrives. Routine medical delivery to places where that currently means a two-hour drive.
Every one of those things gets cheaper, safer, and more common in a world where drone companies can actually exist at scale. None of them happen if the regulatory burden on starting a drone company is so heavy that only incumbents with legal departments can afford to play.
We built Ledger because we want American drone founders to start drone companies and stay drone companies—not slowly metastasize into compliance shops that happen to fly drones on the side. The window is right now.