Volant Aerotech Bags 100M Yuan in Pre-A Round Financing

Volant Aerotech, a Chinese electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) development startup, announced on Thursday that it has completed a pre-A round of financing worth 100 million yuan ($14.94 million) in the first half of this year. This round was led by Future Capital, followed by Qingsong Fund and Welight, and its existing shareholder Shunwei Capital continued to increase its investment.

Founded in June 2021, the firm focuses on providing safe, environmentally friendly and affordable passenger aircraft, as well as solutions for future air travel. It completed the first flight of the 1:3 scaled prototype only two and a half months after its establishment. The company is fully investing in full-scale technology verification aircraft, and will complete the final assembly and delivery in the near future.

The firm has complete engineering and technical capabilities, covering overall aircraft and aerodynamics, system engineering, and flight test and airworthiness certification. It also has the project management ability of civil aviation aircraft and professional supply chain management. Funds from the recently concluded round will be used to promote the R&D, manufacturing and flight test of its full-scale technology demonstrator, accelerate the basic work of airworthiness, and explore the application market.

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Dong Ming, founder and CEO of Volant Aerotech, said: “In recent years, the trend of comprehensive transformation of the automobile industry to new energy has promoted the rapid development of upstream energy system industry, making aviation distributed electric propulsion technology (DEP) possible and mature. This also gave birth to eVTOL, which has the attribute of green economy. As an important part of transportation economic development, we noticed that relevant state departments are actively promoting the opening of low-altitude airspace, which is beneficial to the development of the eVTOL industry. We are actively discussing various application scenarios and their technical performance requirements with many aviation operators.”

As the lead investor of this round of financing, Eric Xia, a partner at Future Capital, said: “We have been focusing on intelligent electric travel since our establishment, and have invested in the field of electric aviation since 2018. eVTOL will become one of the important modes of transportation in the future because of its safety, high efficiency and low cost. It still takes some time for eVTOL to start to be commercialized on a large scale. The tenacity, concentration and enthusiasm of Dong Ming and his team make us willing to be its long-term supporter.”