Tagged: evtol
11 results
Enpower Greentech Inc.
Enpower Greentech is a battery maker building the next generation of lithium-metal and solid-state cells. Founded in 2012 by two post-docs from Nobel laureate John Goodenough's lab, the company designs semi-solid, quasi-solid, and all-solid-state batteries with energy densities pushing past 500 Wh/kg. Its cells power industrial drones, eVTOL aircraft, high-altitude pseudo-satellites, and electric vehicles, and it says it has shipped more than 3 million cells across its SWIFT, FLEET, and KOSMOS platforms from facilities in the US, China, Japan, and Germany.
Ionblox
Ionblox is a Fremont, California battery company building high-energy, high-power lithium-ion cells around a proprietary pre-lithiated silicon (SiOx) anode. Spun out of the earlier Zenlabs Energy effort and rebranded in 2022, the company targets two demanding markets - electric vehicles and electric aviation (eVTOL) - with cells that it says exceed 330 Wh/kg and can charge to roughly 60% in five minutes while holding up past 1,000 cycles. Backed by eVTOL maker Lilium, Applied Ventures, Temasek and Catalus Capital, Ionblox has raised about $32M in Series B funding and holds more than 40 patents.
Jaunt Air Mobility
Jaunt Air Mobility is a Dallas-based aerospace company building the all-electric Journey eVTOL, an air taxi that takes off like a helicopter and cruises like an airplane using patented Slowed Rotor Compound (SRC) technology. Founded in 2019 on intellectual property acquired from Carter Aviation, Jaunt is pursuing a certification path as a rotorcraft and is now a brand within publicly traded AIRO Group Holdings. Its aircraft carries a pilot and four passengers roughly 80-120 miles at 175 mph with low noise and an autorotation safety fallback.
SkyGrid
SkyGrid builds high-assurance, third-party software services that safely fold autonomous aircraft, drones, and eVTOL air taxis into shared airspace. Born as a 2018 Boeing and SparkCognition joint venture and now a subsidiary of Wisk Aero, the Austin-based company delivers a real-time digital twin of the low-altitude sky - weather, obstacles, traffic, and vertiport status - plus automation and decision-support tools that route, synchronize, and deconflict flights at scale.
Javier Vidal
Javier Vidal is the Madrid-born founder and CEO of Moonware, a Los Angeles startup building HALO, the world's first AI-powered Ground Traffic Control platform for airfields. A mechanical engineer trained at Duke who filed his first patent at 15 and became one of Tesla's youngest employees at 19, Vidal cut his teeth on autonomy at Tesla, Uber ATG, and Uber Elevate before setting out to replace the walkie-talkies and whiteboards that still run airport ramps. Moonware has raised roughly $9.3M and deployed HALO with carriers and handlers including British Airways, dnata, Aerocharter, Japan Airlines, and PrimeFlight.
Jia Xu
Jia Xu is CEO of SkyGrid, the Austin, Texas company building high-assurance airspace integration software for autonomous and unmanned flight. With a PhD from Stanford, dual master's degrees from Imperial College London and the London School of Economics, and career stints at the RAND Corporation, Airbus, General Atomics, and Honeywell Aerospace, Xu brings rare cross-disciplinary depth to one of aviation's hardest problems: teaching machines to share the sky. Under his leadership since August 2023, SkyGrid pivoted from generic airspace software to become a specialized third-party services provider for advanced air mobility - and was acquired by Wisk Aero (a Boeing subsidiary) in June 2025.
Martin Peryea
Martin Peryea is an aerospace engineer with more than 40 years in vertical flight who founded Jaunt Air Mobility in 2019 to build a quieter, more efficient electric VTOL air taxi. After 33 years at Bell Helicopter, where he became a Technical Fellow and chief engineer on the fly-by-wire Bell 525 Relentless, he bet his career on a contrarian idea: a single rotor that slows down in cruise while a wing does the lifting. That Slowed Rotor Compound design became the Jaunt Journey. He now leads the Electric Air Mobility division of The AIRO Group as Senior Vice President and General Manager.
James Dorris
James Dorris is the co-founder and CEO of Odys Aviation, a Long Beach company building long-range, hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft that take off and land like a helicopter but cruise like an airplane. A former fusion physicist who started at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, he helped build the propulsion and levitation tech at Virgin Hyperloop One before turning to flight. At Odys he is chasing aircraft that can lift off from a helipad, fly up to 1,000 miles on a hybrid system, and cut regional travel emissions sharply while serving defense, logistics, and passenger markets.
WaveAerospace
WaveAerospace builds unmanned aircraft that fly when nothing else can. Based in Stratford, Connecticut, the company designs heavy-weather drones, UAVs and hybrid VTOL aircraft for police, emergency services, offshore operators and the military - machines rated to operate in wind, rain and snow that ground conventional drones. Its lineup includes the all-weather Falcon II multicopter, the GPS-contested Nyx, the heavy-lift Mule, and the Huntress Turbojet, a hybrid jet that reaches roughly Mach 0.4.
Rick Luebbe
Rick Luebbe is the CEO and co-founder of Group14 Technologies, the Woodinville, Washington company behind SCC55, a silicon-carbon battery material that boosts energy density up to 50% and enables extreme fast charging. A former Army aviation officer who flew scout helicopters in Desert Storm and later commanded an Apache attack company, he traded the cockpit for a Stanford MBA and three startups. After building B2B integrator Hubspan and selling battery-materials pioneer EnerG2 to BASF in 2016, he spun out Group14 in 2015 with co-founder Rick Costantino. The company has raised more than $1 billion, including a $463M Series D, and is building the world's largest factory for advanced silicon battery materials. His mission, stated plainly: electrify everything.
Alan Zhang
Alan Zhang (Rongyu Zhang) is a San Francisco-based founder, aerospace engineer, and YouTube creator who built the first human-carrying eVTOL drone assembled by a high schooler — a 280kg-thrust electric aircraft completed in 327 days with 17 classmates in a Diamond Bar garage. Now at UC Berkeley's MET program (Management, Entrepreneurship & Technology), he is building Prototype 3 of his passenger drone and running a stealth startup, while his YouTube channel @alanzeekk documents his journey building interesting machines.