Wingcopter, a Weiterstadt, Germany-based developer, manufacturer and operator of unmanned delivery drones for commercial and humanitarian applications, secured $22m in Series A funding.
The round was led by Xplorer Capital and Futury Regio Growth Fund, with participation from Futury Ventures and Hessen Kapital III.
The company will use the funds to strengthen its leadership in drone-based logistics, with a special focus on healthcare-related applications, including the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, and to establish partnerships worldwide around other fully automated delivery applications.
Led by Tom Plümmer, CEO, the company is a manufacturer of unmanned eVTOL fixed-wing aircraft. It currently provides the Wingcopter 178 Heavy Lift, which provides both one- and two-way delivery, covering distances of up to 120 kilometers. It can accurately lower a package through a winch mechanism, or land at the point of destination and return to its origin with new payload. To further expand its market reach, Wingcopter is advancing its efforts to launch the next generation of its aircraft, a delivery drone with technical specifications. Pre-orders can already be placed.
In addition to selling drones, the company will expand its drone-delivery-as-a-service offerings. These services give customers the opportunity to instantly benefit from Wingcopter’s technology and its BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) flight operations track record on five continents without having to own and maintain a fleet of drones, hire and train pilots, or run operations themselves.
A portion of the new capital is allocated to setting up a partially automated serial production at Wingcopter’s new 7,200 square meter (77,500 square feet) site in Weiterstadt, Germany, where already more than 100 people are employed. The company plans to further grow the team in the fields of flight testing, certification, production (including a new U.S. facility), and software development, specifically focused on ground and flight control software, embedded systems, software architecture, and cloud infrastructure.
FinSMEs
25/01/2021