Callan Carpenter

Chief Revenue Officer Skydio

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Callan Carpenter is Chief Revenue Officer of Skydio, the largest American manufacturer of autonomous drones, whose aircraft are used by police and fire departments, electric utilities, departments of transportation, and the US military. He is responsible for the company’s global revenue organisation at a business that has to sell simultaneously into three very different buyers: municipal public safety agencies with small budgets and procurement rules, large asset-inspection enterprises, and defence customers. His own background is not in aviation but in the software that engineers use to design physical things. Across roughly four decades he has worked in semiconductors and electronic design automation, co-founded and run an EDA company, led global named accounts and global services at Autodesk, served as chief revenue officer of the aerial-imagery company EagleView, and led digital-twin business development at Unity. He also holds a private pilot licence, which is an unusual and apt qualification for the job.

Career Highlights

• Chief Revenue Officer of Skydio, listed on the company’s own leadership page as of September 2026 alongside co-founder and CEO Adam Bry and CTO Abe Bachrach.
• Recruited as Chief Revenue Officer of EagleView in May 2019, with responsibility for global sales and customer success, in an appointment the company announced publicly.
• Co-founded Silicon Metrics and served as its chief executive officer, building an electronic design automation business in semiconductor library characterisation.
• Held two vice-president roles at Autodesk, leading Global Named Accounts and the Global Services organisation spanning product support, customer success and professional consulting, as well as digital manufacturing sales.
• Served as Vice President of Digital Twins at Unity, taking a real-time 3D engine built for games into industrial and infrastructure simulation.
• Held leadership positions at Arm and at Mentor Graphics earlier in his semiconductor career.
• Credited by EagleView in 2019 with more than 33 years in technology, placing the start of his career in the mid-1980s.
• Holds a private pilot licence, a B.S. in electrical engineering and an M.B.A., the latter two both from the University of Texas at Austin.

Professional Journey

Carpenter began in semiconductors and electronic design automation, the software used to design and verify integrated circuits. He held leadership positions at Mentor Graphics, one of the three large EDA vendors, and at Arm, the British processor architecture licensor, and co-founded Silicon Metrics, an EDA company working in library characterisation, where he served as chief executive officer. That early stretch gave him the pattern that has shaped the rest of his career: selling highly technical tools to engineers who are building physical products, where the buyer is an expert and the sale turns on demonstrable engineering outcomes rather than on brand.

He moved into engineering software at Autodesk, the design-software company whose products span architecture, construction and manufacturing. There he held two vice-president roles, one leading Global Named Accounts, the company’s largest enterprise relationships, and one leading Global Services, the organisation covering product support, customer success and professional consulting, alongside responsibility for digital manufacturing sales. The combination of a large-account sales role and a services delivery role is a useful one for a future revenue chief, because it puts the post-sale relationship and the pre-sale relationship under the same person.

In May 2019 he left Autodesk to become Chief Revenue Officer of EagleView, the aerial imagery and property data company, announced by EagleView as a recruit of a “seasoned tech leader” with more than 33 years in the industry. The remit was global sales and customer success, and the business was his first in aerial data: EagleView flies fixed-wing aircraft and drones to capture imagery of roofs and properties and sells the derived measurements to insurers, roofing contractors and government. It was, in effect, his introduction to the market Skydio serves from the hardware side.

From EagleView he moved to Unity, the real-time 3D engine company, as Vice President of Digital Twins. The digital-twin push was Unity’s attempt to take a graphics engine developed for video games into industrial simulation, where the same rendering and physics technology is used to model factories, buildings and vehicles. It was a business-development role in an emerging category rather than a scaled sales organisation, and it sat squarely between his Autodesk engineering-software experience and the autonomy market.

He joined Skydio as Chief Revenue Officer, bringing that sequence to a company whose product is itself an autonomous flying computer. Skydio’s commercial challenge is less about the technology than about the buyers: public safety agencies running drone-as-first-responder programmes, utilities inspecting transmission lines, transportation departments surveying bridges, and defence procurement, each with a different sales cycle. His own account of what he does, given on joining EagleView, was about helping customers use technology to achieve business outcomes, and the private pilot licence he holds gives him a direct feel for the airspace and regulatory environment his customers operate in.

Education

University of Texas at Austin

B.S., Electrical Engineering

University of Texas at Austin

M.B.A.