As well as the likes of
Romeo Durscher, senior director of public safety integration at DJI, departed late 2020. Cynthia Huang, DJI’s former director of business development also left.
Arnaud Thiercelin, formerly DJI’s head of R&D in the US, also recently made the leap to Auterion.
I’m hearing from Silicon Valley friends that the Palo Alto research & development office is simply seeing the continuation of DJI’s “Long March” reform or reorganization. This makes sense, too, given DJI’s recent addition to the US government’s Entity List (blacklist).
From a different perspective, their Palo Alto office accomplished one of its primary mission objectives: They developed and released the game-changing LiDAR solutions, Zenmuse P1 and L1. DJI will most certainly be affected by their blacklist status of these solutions, but the Palo Alto office got it’s job done.
And when you watch execs quickly moving between Tesla, Apple, Google, Zooks and other autonomous vehicle developers here in the Valley, the movement between DJI and other UAV technology companies is nothing new. These R&D offices‘ staffing ebb and flow with every changing corporate strategic initiative.