urban-air-mobility
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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.
Marc Allen
Marc Allen is the CEO of Electra.aero, a Manassas, Virginia startup building the EL9, a nine-seat hybrid-electric ultra-short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) aircraft that can lift off in roughly 150 feet of runway. A Yale Law graduate and former U.S. Supreme Court clerk who spent 17 years at Boeing - including stints as Chief Strategy Officer, President of Boeing International, and Chairman of Wisk Aero - Allen left the world's largest aerospace company in August 2024 to run a startup chasing what he calls 'Direct Aviation': air travel without airports, emissions, or noise. Under his watch Electra has stacked up roughly 2,200 pre-orders worth nearly $9 billion and closed a $115 million Series B.