Most Western buyers could not name the company, yet they have probably watched its work. Damoda, a Shenzhen-based drone-show specialist, has flown at seven CCTV Spring Festival Galas and turned up repeatedly on the national evening news. What the footage hides is a business that has quietly become one of the most watched bets in China’s low-altitude economy.
The performances are the shop window, not the profit centre. According to the company, device sales make up roughly 70 per cent of revenue and research staff about 40 per cent of headcount. The real asset is the swarm equipment and the control systems underneath it. Over the past five years, overseas device sales have climbed 45-fold, and the firm is building a second product line around embodied intelligence, pushing into consumer scenarios and advancing a financing round ahead of a planned 2027 IPO filing.
Low-altitude media: from festival extra to traffic engine
The clearest commercial template is what Damoda calls low-altitude converged media, refined in Chongqing. A 3,000-drone CCTV Spring Festival slot in 2025 led to regular weekend shows that scaled from 2,000 to a fixed 5,000-drone residency, supported by nests and automatic charging for what the company calls infinite flight, the largest sustained aerial performance of its kind anywhere.
The numbers matter more than the spectacle. Across nearly a year of operation, the Chongqing shows drew over 11 million live spectators and 11 billion views on official platforms, lifted the riverside district’s cultural-tourism spend by 41.9 billion yuan, up about 9 per cent year on year, and pushed Spring Festival food and beverage sales in the core area up nearly 30 per cent. Brands including Changan, Tencent and Mixue moved in as advertisers, and the project cleared more than 40 million yuan in revenue, enough to cover its own cost.
Going global, 45 times over
Damoda entered overseas markets in 2020. Five years on, sales are up 45-fold across more than 50 countries and regions, with North America, Europe and the Middle East as the core markets. The shift in order size tells the story: before 2025, overseas clients tested the water with 200 or 300 units. In 2026 the step-change arrived. A German LED-screen maker bought 800 units last November, re-ordered 1,000 at the start of the year, then placed a single 5,000-unit order. A Thai client’s Vietnam anniversary show, flown with 10,518 drones, passed one million likes on TikTok.
Damoda sells equipment and know-how, not execution. It hands partners its design tools, operator resources and a library of tens of thousands of creative scripts, reasoning that overseas clients often produce better local content than the company could.
A localised, automated stack
The backbone is fully in-house. The firm has shifted its hardware from imported positioning modules to 100 per cent domestic chips compatible with Beidou. Automation was forced by overseas labour costs: the V3 boxed takeoff and landing system in 2022 reset industry expectations, and the V4 vehicle-mounted system now opens, debugs, launches and recovers a show in about 60 seconds, against a traditional setup of five people and three hours. One operator in a Shandong scenic spot now runs 500 drones. This year’s AI script editor turns a text prompt such as “500 drones, happy birthday, a pattern” into a flight-ready script in 25 minutes.
The second curve: cluster embodied intelligence
Built on a mature swarm-control platform and more than 66 million flight sorties of data, Damoda is developing drone clusters for GPS-denied, enclosed or hazardous spaces, using multi-sensor fusion to map, navigate and decide without satellite fix. A demo is expected by the end of the year or early next. The company has restructured into a joint-stock entity, raised several rounds at a valuation near ten times its Series A, and cites a 36 per cent global share of the drone-show swarm market, the industry leader.
The flying billboard was always the window. The business was the box that flies, and the next decade may belong to the swarm that works.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Leiphone report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://www.leiphone.com/category/robot/OA7EpCSSkv3D6yMD.html.