German eVTOL Manufacturer to Bring Home the Bacon

Wingcopter, the German aerospace company that designs and manufactures unmanned eVTOL delivery drones, announced on 21 June 2022 that it had secured a $42-million series A extension that will help the company expand its purview into market segments such as grocery and consumer-good delivery.

To date, Wingcopter has operated primarily in sub-Saharan Africa, delivering medical supplies to rural areas.

The extension, which more than triples Wingcopter’s total equity raise to over $60-million, attracted noteworthy investors the likes of Germany’s Rewe Group, one of the country’s largest grocery retailers with 12,000 stores across Europe; disruptive technology investors Salvia and XAI Technologies; and Japan’s Itochu, a trading company likely to provide Wingcopter a foothold in the Japanese market.

In addition to expanding globally, Wingcopter seeks to apply the new funding to upping production of its flagship Wingcopter 198 drone— an all-electric, vertical-take-off-and-landing (eVTOL), fixed-wing, all-weather vehicle capable of carrying a a six-kilogram payload up to 75 kilometers on a single battery charge, or a lesser, one-kilogram load up to 95-kilometers.

With new financial assets on which to draw, it remains unclear whether Wingcopter intends to modify its extant, Wingcopter 198 platform or develop a nimbler, clean-sheet design to actualize the company’s grocery-fetching aspirations.

In any case, The firm plans to hire eighty employees across all of its departments over the next few months.

In a general sense, times are good at Wingcopter. In May, the company secured Special Class Airworthiness Criteria from the FAA—a major step toward the commencement of commercial deliveries in the U.S.

Shortly thereafter, the company reached an agreement with Continental Drones to deploy 12,000 Wingcopter 198 aircraft across sub-Saharan Africa. The project will span five-years and instantiates the largest commercial drone deployment in history.

FMI: https://wingcopter.com