In a blog he started after graduating from the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis, Michael Norcia recounted his adolescent obsession with building remote controlled airplanes.
“Much like how our species went through a variety of ages — the stone age, iron age, etc. — I went through the paper age, the hot glue age, the balsa age, the foam age, and the composite age,” wrote Norcia, who graduated in 2014 with a B.S. in applied physics. “My initial attempts when working with a new medium were consistently atrocious. But through much trial and error, I formed a certain level of mastery.”
That mastery has extended to the present day with Norcia’s role as cofounder and CEO of Pyka, a company that specializes in designing and manufacturing autonomous electric aircraft for agricultural and cargo purposes.
Starting out in his parents’ garage in 2017, Norcia eventually had to move Pyka to the backyard where there was room for a proof-of-concept prototype called “Big Bird.”
Today, Pyka is headquartered in a 110,000 sq. ft. historic aviation hangar in Alameda, Calif. In 2022, the company raised $37 million in Series A funding and in 2024, it raised a further $40 million in Series B funding.
The company’s electric, autonomous aircraft have been deployed in the U.S., Central America and Brazil with big name customers such as Dole, SLC Agrícola, Sierra Nevada Corporation, Heinen Brothers Agra Services and the United States Air Force. Its next-generation, agricultural spray aircraft Pelican 2 — the largest uncrewed aerial system approved for commercial use by the Federal Aviation Administration — debuted in February at the 2025 World Ag Expo in Tulare, Calif.
“There is just like this fundamental passion for aviation that I have that is unquenchable,” Norcia said in an interview with L&S Magazine. “I’d grown up building things my whole life and always knew that I wanted to be building things in my career.”
The genesis of Pyka
At UC Davis, Norcia found an intellectual environment conducive to his free spirit. He played ultimate frisbee, lived in a communal living space located on 2nd Street and, along with friends, bought an old school bus, which they retrofitted and used to travel.
“I think there’s something sort of entrepreneurial about Davis,” Norcia said. “I really liked that about the culture.”
Following graduation, Norcia pursued his professional interest in the aviation space. He worked at a few Bay Area-located electric airplane companies focused on building vertical takeoff and landing air taxis.
“I worked at those companies, but it was clear that we weren’t going to commercialize anything for probably 20 years or so,” Norcia said. “That was not very appealing to me, so I left to start Pyka with some friends of mine.”
“We believed that automating and electrifying flight was possible and would have some really positive benefits to society, especially in the long run,” he added. “We wanted to start a company that would take a really practical approach around actually commercializing the technology.”
With a goal of creating a more environmentally friendly and autonomous aviation technology, Norcia and his colleagues started working on shifting the aviation industry in that direction.
In August 2017, the team’s prototype, Big Bird, completed its first fully automated flight. Norcia and Pyka have been off to the races ever since.
Pelican 2
During the 2025 World Ag Expo in Tulare, Calif., Pyka unveiled Pelican 2, the latest generation of its crop spraying aircraft.
“It’s the biggest crop spraying drone on the market by almost a factor of 10,” Norcia said. “And it solves very burning needs that farmers have.”
Capable of carrying a 300-liter payload, Pelican 2 features a four-motor electric propulsion system and can cover up to 90 hectares per hour.
“Spraying by air is a really useful tool, but it’s really difficult and hard to be precise. And traditionally, it can’t be done at night,” said Norcia, referencing the advantage autonomous aircraft have over piloted aircraft. “Our technology solves all those issues. It’s less expensive than the current solution, it’s an order of magnitude more precise and we have really cool spray technology that lets us minimize the amount of chemical that floats off the field.”
Around the same time Pyka unveiled Pelican 2, the company announced that it had secured an order for 20 aircraft in Brazil. With all the recent hubbub, Norcia is optimistic about the company’s future.
“I’m more confident in our underlying thesis today than I was when we started Pyka,” he said. “That’s really satisfying.”
And underlying it all — the entrepreneurial thread, the company and the aircraft — is a passion, and perhaps obsession, for flight.
“I just spend most of my waking hours thinking about flying things,” Norcia said.
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