Michael Norcia says he wasn’t planning to make a cargo plane. When he started Pyka in his parents’ Bay Area garage in 2017, the game plan was to build an electric autonomous crop sprayer as a stepping stone toward the holy grail many aviation startups are pursuing: zero-emissions, unpiloted passenger aircraft.

Norcia and his cofounders decided that crop spraying offered better initial business prospects than hauling cargo, in part due to fewer regulatory and safety concerns. Flying over farm fields, a crash would only harm produce, not people.