You already fly. We need the paperwork to be worth something.
Sparse is assembling a network of licensed drone operators who capture aerial imagery under a licence that is actually clean — so it can lawfully be used to train machine-learning models.
Why this is not another pilot marketplace
Marketplaces sell your flight hours. The imagery goes to one client, once, and the rights are usually vague enough that nobody can build on it afterwards. That model is seven years old and it has never produced an asset.
The flight is the cheap part. The valuable part is a signed chain — this airframe, this operator, this credential, this consent, this licence — attached to the file and verifiable by whoever eventually wants to train on it.
We went and checked how bad it is. Of 54 public aerial datasets we audited by opening the actual licence, 14 are cleanly usable in a commercial model. Seventeen are outright blocked, eleven have no determinable licence at all, seven are contaminated by their upstream source, four carry share-alike risk that infects whatever you build, and one is gated. Every verdict has a licence URL you can open and check.
Being straight with you: we are early. We are building the supply network and the rights layer first, deliberately, because that is the part nobody can copy quickly. Joining now means a say in how this works and your name on the record from the beginning, rather than immediate income.
What we are asking
Register your interest and your credential. That is genuinely all, right now. We need to be able to say truthfully how many licensed operators, in how many countries, have committed to fly.
Later, when a capture is commissioned: fly a specified pattern to a written spec, and deliver with the flight log intact.
Grant a licence to the imagery you capture for us — non-exclusive to your own business. You keep your own work, your own clients and your own archive. We only ever license what we specifically commission.
What you get
Nothing on spec. We will not ask you to fly anything that has not been agreed in advance.
Named in the provenance record. Every dataset we publish credits the operators who flew it, by name and by credential, unless you ask us not to.
No exclusivity, ever. Fly for anyone else you like, including our competitors.
Founding-operator status if you are in the first hundred. When a spec lands in your region, you hear about it from us before anyone outside the network does. Your name and credential sit in the public record of the index. And while the network is this small, the way it works is still open to argument — founding operators get to shape it.
Who qualifies
You hold a current remote-pilot credential or operator registration in your country — FAA Part 107, CAA / EASA A2 CofC or GVC, CASA RePL, ANAC, DGCA, or your national equivalent.
You can fly a planned survey grid, not just freehand video.
You can deliver original files with EXIF and flight logs unstripped.
Register
Your details reach us through this form and go no further. Your credential number is never published.
What we do with your data →