The world’s largest maker of commercial drones and one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms want to kickstart the drones ecosystem.

Today, Accel Partners, a VC firm that’s backed heavyweights like Facebook, Dropbox, and Spotify, announced SkyFund, a new drones fund in conjunction with China’s DJI, the maker of popular quadcopters like the Phantom and the Inspire.

The new venture aims to pump a minimum of $10 million into early-stage hardware and software startups developing tools that both the enterprise and consumer markets can use on DJI drones. It plans on investing a minimum of $250,000 in each startup it funds, and possibly more. Over time, it may expand the fund beyond $10 million. The timing is good: according to this year’s report on Internet and other trends from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’s Mary Meeker, the consumer drone market over the past two years looks downright hockey-stick-ish. Check page 82 of the report to see just how big it has grown.

The fund will also be used to boost technologies in the “booming field of robotics and intelligent machines,” Accel wrote in a blog post.

The announcement of SkyFund comes just a couple weeks after Accel said it had invested $75 million directly in DJI.

“We’re not just providing financing…for early-stage companies, but also technology and go-to-market resources to help these companies build interesting component applications,” says Sameer Gandhi, one of the partners at Accel overseeing SkyFund, which is expected to invest in the developers of tools for the mapping, imaging, agriculture, oil and gas, and mining industries, among others. “We think there’s a whole opportunity to feed a series of companies doing these types of applications.”

For DJI, the hope is that by putting its time and money into startups developing for its platform, the size of its overall market will grow quickly. Already, DJI has made early forays into expanding the size of its ecosystem by releasing a software developers kit that allowed outsiders to build for the platform, as well as a set of APIs. Now, it’s doubling down on the strategy of expanding the ecosystem outside of what it can build and design itself.