Uber Elevate
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Whisper Aero emerges from stealth to quiet drones and air taxis
The skies are on the cusp of getting busier — and louder — as drone delivery and electric vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft startups move from moonshot to commercialization. One former NASA engineer and ex-director of Uber’s air taxi division is developing tech to ensure that more air traffic doesn’t equal more noise.
Mark Moore, who was most recently director of engineering at Uber Elevate until its acquisition by Joby Aviation, has a launched his own company called Whisper Aero. The startup, which came out of stealth this week, is aiming to designing an electric thruster it says will blend noise emitted from delivery drones and eVTOLs alike into background levels, making them nearly imperceptible to the human ear.
It’s a formidable challenge. Solving the noise problem comes down to more than simply cranking down the volume. Noise profiles are also characterized by other variables, like frequency. For example, helicopters have a main rotor and tail rotor that generate two separate frequencies, which makes them much more irritating to the human ear than if they were at a single frequency, Moore told TechCrunch in a recent interview.
Complicating the picture even further is that eVTOL companies are designing entirely new types of aircraft, ones that may generate different acoustic profiles than other rotorcraft (like helicopters). The U.S. Army recently undertook a research study confirming that eVTOL rotors generate more of a type of noise referred to as broadband, rather than tonal noise which is generated by helicopters. And as each eVTOL company is developing its own design, not all of the electric aircraft will generate the same level or kind of noise.
Whisper is designing its scalable product to be adoptable across the board.
Moore said the idea for the company had been fomenting for years. He and Whisper COO Ian Villa, who headed strategy and simulation at Elevate, realized years ago that noise (that is, less of it) was key to air taxis taking off.
“The thing that was abundantly clear was, noise matters most,” Villa said. “It is the hardest barrier to break through. And not enough of these developers were spending the time, the resources, the mindshare to really unlock that.”
Whisper CEO Mark Moore. Image Credits: Whisper Aero (opens in a new window)
Helicopters have mostly been able to get away with their terrible noise profile because they are used so infrequently. But eVTOL companies like Joby Aviation are envisioning far higher ride volumes. Moore is quick to point out that companies like Joby (which purchased Elevate at the end of 2020) are already developing aircraft that are many times quieter than helicopter, and are “a step in the right direction.”
“The question is, ‘is it enough of a step to get to significant adoption?’ And that’s what we’re focused on.”
Whisper is staying mum on the details of its thruster design. It has managed to attract around $7.5 million investment from firms like Lux Capital, Menlo Ventures, Kindred Ventures and Robert Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition Ventures. It’s also aiming to convert its provisional patents with the United States Patent and Trademark Office sometime next year.
From there, the startup envisions launching in the small drone market around 2023, before scaling progressively up to air taxis. Moore said the goal is to get the thrusters manufactured and in vehicles by the end of the decade. Should the first generation of eVTOL go to market in 2024 (as Archer Aviation and Joby have proposed), Whisper’s product could potentially appear in second generation eVTOL.
In the meantime, Whisper will continue testing and working out remaining technical challenges – least among which is how to manufacture the end product at a reasonable cost. Whisper is also preparing to conduct dynamic testing in a wind tunnel, in addition to the static tests it has undertaken at its Tennessee headquarters, some in partnership with the U.S. Air Force.
“It’s got to be quiet enough to blend into the background noise,” Moore said. “We know this and that’s the technology we’re developing.”
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Uber sells air taxi business Elevate to Joby Aviation, shedding its last moonshot
Uber has offloaded its air taxi enterprise Elevate to Joby Aviation, the last of several moonshots to be sold by the ride-hailing company in a pursuit to stick to its core business and reach profitability.
The transaction announced Tuesday is part of a complex deal that includes Uber investing $75 million into Joby and an expanded partnership between the two companies. Last year, Uber and Joby, which is developing an all-electric, vertical take-off and landing passenger aircraft, signed on as a vehicle partner for Uber’s Elevate initiative. Joby was the first partner to commit to deploying air taxi services by 2023.
The $75 million investment comes in addition to a previously undisclosed $50 million investment made as part of Joby’s Series C financing round in January 2020, Uber said. To date, Joby Aviation has raised $820 million. Uber has invested a total of $125 million into the startup.
Under the deal, which is expected to close in early 2021, the two parent companies have agreed to integrate their respective services into each other’s apps.
“Advanced air mobility has the potential to be exponentially positive for the environment and future generations,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement. “This deal allows us to deepen our partnership with Joby, the clear leader in this field, to accelerate the path to market for these technologies.”
While Joby is considered one of the leaders, Elevate did play a role in shaping the nascent industry, including establishing some of the benchmarks used by competitors.
“The team at Uber Elevate has not only played an important role in our industry, they have also developed a remarkable set of software tools that build on more than a decade of experience enabling on-demand mobility,” Joby Aviation CEO JoeBen Bevirt said in a statement.” These tools and new team members will be invaluable to us as we accelerate our plans for commercial launch.”
One year ago, Uber’s business model could be categorized as an “all of the above approach,” a strategy to generate revenue from all forms of transportation, including ride-hailing, micromobility, logistics and package and food delivery. The COVID-19 pandemic and Khosrowshahi’s focus on profitability prompted the company to dump its moonshots and double down on delivery with its acquisition of Postmates.
Today, Uber is a company focused on ride-hailing and delivery while keeping its hand in micromobility, logistics and autonomous vehicles through a series of deals struck in 2020.
The Joby-Elevate terms are similar to two other Uber deals this year. In the spring, Uber led a $170 million funding round in micromobility startup Lime. As part of the deal, Lime acquired Uber’s micromobility subsidiary Jump. The majority of Jump’s 400 employees were laid off. Earlier this week, autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation reached an agreement with Uber to buy the ride-hailing firm’s self-driving unit in a complex deal that will value the combined company at $10 billion.
Just like Uber’s deals with Lime and now Joby, Aurora isn’t paying cash for Uber ATG, a company that was last valued at $7.25 billion. Instead, Uber is handing over its equity in ATG and investing $400 million into Aurora, which will give it a 26% stake in the combined company, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Uber said in October that it sold off a $500 million stake in its Uber Freight business to an investor group led by New York-based investment firm Greenbriar Equity Group. The deal valued the unit at $3.3 billion on a post-money basis. Uber has maintained its majority stake in Uber Freight, unlike the Jump, Elevate and ATG deals.
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Embraer’s new EmbraerX eVTOL concept is accessible, autonomous and courteous
Short-distance commuter air travel has come a long way in the past few years — at least when it comes to concepts. The latest vision from Embraer of how we’ll get around in the city skies of the (near?) future involves some of what we’ve already seen, and highlights a few things that make clear where it’s focusing its priorities — namely, on community adoption and acceptance.
The concept created by EmbraerX, which is aircraft maker Embraer’s market acceleration and innovation arm, features electric power, as well as vertical take-off and landing (the “eVTOL” piece of the puzzle). It’s optimized for a ridesharing model, and is focused on “user experience” as well as “making the aircraft easily accessible to everyone,” according to the company.
It includes redundant flight systems for safety, as well as an intentional effort to reduce overall noise output with an eight rotor system that distributes lift across the span of the vehicle’s body. The introductory video highlights how the concept vehicle can accommodate passengers who user wheelchairs, and there’s both fly-by-wire control for today, as well as all the technology on board needed for autonomous operation once the tech is ready.
No word on target timelines for bringing these to the actual skies, but this looks a lot more technically feasible when compared to existing aircraft, beyond maybe an electric drivetrain that can provide the kind of lift needed for transporting what looks like up to four passengers, and doing so reliably and consistently.
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ChargePoint is ready for flying EVs
Yesterday I wrote about a poll conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan that found people were interested in flying cars if they were autonomous, shared and electric. As soon as I posted that, I found an email in my inbox saying that ChargePoint and Uber Elevate, among others at the recent conference on flying vehicles, had partnered to prepare for just that exact scenario. Read More
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