Autonomous aviation startup Xwing hits $400M valuation after latest funding round

Published April 15, 2021

The safety pilot has his hands off the controls during an Xwing demonstration flight. Image Credits: Xwing

Xwing has scored another win two months after it completed its first gate-to-gate autonomous demonstration flight of a commercial cargo aircraft. The company said Thursday it has raised $40 million at a post-money valuation of $400 million.

The company is setting its sights on expansion — not only tripling its engineering team, but eventually running regular fully unmanned commercial cargo flights.

Xwing has been developing a technology stack to convert aircraft, including a widely used Cessna Grand Caravan 208B, to function autonomously. But it’s had to solve a few problems first: “the perception problem, the planning problem and the control problem,” Xwing founder Marc Piette explained to TechCrunch. The company has come up with a whole suite of solutions to solve for these problems, including integrating lidar, radar and cameras on the plane; retrofitting the servomotors that control the rudder, braking and other functions; and ensuring all of these are communicating properly so the plane understands where it is in space and can execute its flight.

The company has already performed close to 200 missions with its AutoFlight system. For all these flights, there’s been a safety pilot on board. In addition, a ground control operator sits in a control center and acts as a go-between from the autonomous aircraft to the human air traffic control operator.

Xwing plans short, regional flights for its autonomous cargo planes

“We don’t anticipate automating [communication with air traffic control], trying to do natural language processing and having a computer make the response to the air traffic controller,” Piette said. “For safety critical applications, we don’t view that as a useful path…but what we do, though, is we have a ground operator in our control room that just talks to air traffic control on behalf of the aircraft. So for the air traffic controller, it’s seamless. As far as they’re concerned, they are just talking to a pilot onboard the aircraft.”

Image Credits: Xwing

For its autonomous flight activities, the company has authorization from the Federal Aviation Administration to fly under an experimental airworthiness certificate for research and development that was expanded in August of last year to include a special flight permit for optionally piloted aircraft (OPA).

The company is looking to eventually remove the safety pilot, but only once full safety redundancies are in place, Piette added. That includes redundancies across all sensors and computer systems. Fortunately for all of us that fly, commercial aviation safety levels are extremely high. It means a high airworthiness standard for aviation startups. Smaller Class III aircraft like the ones Xwing is targeting must demonstrate a risk of one catastrophic failure per hundred million flight hours.

Xwing’s activities have garnered attention from investors. This most recent funding round was led by Blackhorn Ventures, with participation from ACME Capital, Loup Ventures, R7 Partners, Eniac Ventures, Alven Capital and Array Ventures. Including this round, the company has raised $55 million in total capital.

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The autonomous flights are only one part of Xwing’s business activities. It’s also been flying manned commercial cargo operations under a contract with a large logistics company signed December 1.

“We set up what’s effectively an airline,” Piette said. By modifying these aircraft with sensors to collect data, Xwing is able to feed this valuable flight time into a training algorithm, and collect other useful data, such as how often the pilots communicate with air traffic controllers and the types of directions the craft receives.

Looking ahead, the company will be significantly scaling its workforce over the next 12 months, in addition to increasing its commercial operations in parallel. On the technology side, Xwing is looking to fly autonomous commercial cargo flights, with a safety pilot onboard, under an experimental ticket and exemption from the FAA. The company will likely reach this milestone also within the next 12 months, Piette said. After that, it would look to remove the safety pilot from the aircraft. Even then, the company would still need to get its systems certified to completely remove any constraints on its movements in airspace.

Autonomous aviation startup Xwing raises $10M to scale its software for pilotless flights

Published May 20, 2020

Autonomous aviation startup Xwing locked in a $10 million funding round before COVID-19 hit. Now the San Francisco-based startup is using the capital to hire talent and scale the development of its software stack as it aims for commercial operations later this year — pending FAA approvals.

The company announced Wednesday its Series A funding round, which was led by R7 Partners, with participation from early-stage VC Alven, Eniac Ventures and Thales Corporate Ventures. Xwing has already hired several key executives with that fresh injection of capital, including Terrafugia’s former co-founder and COO Anna Dietrich, and Ed Lim, a Lockheed Martin and Aurora Flight Sciences veteran who more recently led guidance navigation and control for Uber’s autonomous car division as well as Zipline’s AV delivery drone.

Xwing is different from some of the other autonomous aviation startups that have popped up in recent years. The startup isn’t building autonomous helicopters and planes. Instead, it’s focused on the software stack that will enable pilotless flight of small passenger aircraft.

Xwing is also aircraft agnostic. The company’s engineers are focused on the key functions of autonomous flight, such as sensing, reasoning and control. The software stack, which is designed to work across different kinds of aircraft, is integrated into existing aerospace systems. That strategy of retrofitting existing aircraft will speed up deployment, while maintaining safety and keeping costs in check, according to founder and CEO Marc Piette. It also is a straighter path toward regulatory approval.

“It’s more effective for us to not constrain ourselves to a given vehicle and to develop technology that is considered more of an enabler— from a marketing perspective — than going full stack, Piette said when asked if Xwing would ever try to build an autonomous aircraft from the ground up.

Since Xwing’s last funding round — $4 million in summer 2018 — the company has been developing its tech and working with the FAA to receive flight certification for pilotless aircraft. Once approved, the company will seek to commercialize pilotless flights.

The startup hasn’t named any commercial partners yet. And Piette hasn’t provided details about its commercial strategy either, although he said to expect more announcements this year.

Xwing is already working with Bell for NASA’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS in the NAS) program, an initiative meant to mature the key remaining technologies that are needed to integrate unmanned aircraft in U.S. airspace. The program plans to hold demonstration flights this summer.

Autonomous-aviation startup Xwing takes flight with $4 million in funding

Published July 31, 2018

Marc Piette had a revelation as he buzzed in and out of the Palo Alto Airport in pursuit of his pilot’s license. Instead of freedom, he saw restraint. He also saw potential.

“It became pretty apparent that there were major issues with the general aviation industry with smaller aircraft,” Piette said in a recent interview with TechCrunch. “And yet it had enormous potential to change the way people moved around.”

Now, Piette’s two-year-old autonomous-aviation startup Xwing is ramping up to unlock that potential. The company, which has kept a low profile since its founding, isn’t building autonomous helicopters and planes. Instead, it’s focused on the software stack that will enable pilotless flight of small passenger aircraft.

The company announced Tuesday that it has raised $4 million in a seed round led by Eniac Ventures. Array Ventures, along with Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison and Nat Friedman of Xamarin, Microsoft and GitHub, also participated in the round.

The funding will be used by the San Francisco-based company to scale operations and continue to hire aerospace and software talent.

The startup has about a dozen employees, including some uniquely talented folks who have experience with optionally piloted vehicles, unmanned systems and certified avionics. For example, the company’s CTO, Maxime Gariel, worked on autonomous-aviation projects such as DARPA Gremlins and the AgustaWestland SW4 Solo autonomous helicopter. Other members of the small team previously worked at Rockwill Collins, with the Naval Research Lab, Google, and McKinsey.

Piette, whose last company Locu was acquired by GoDaddy, sees several restraints to small passenger aircraft: the skill level required to fly a plane and the cost of earning a pilot’s license and accessing a plane. The relatively puny sales volume of small aircraft — just 3,293 general aviation aircraft, including helicopters, were delivered last year worldwide, in contrast to more than 80 million cars — has depressed innovation and kept prices high.

And even when people have both a license and an aircraft, they still must travel from a small airport to their final destination.

The company is focusing on the key functions of autonomous flight, such as sensing, reasoning and control.

Xwing isn’t pinned to one kind of aircraft. Piette said the system is designed to work across different kinds of aircraft. For instance, the company spent 18 months testing on a subscale fixed-wing aircraft. It tested on a helicopter more recently.

Xwing is developing and integrating those technologies for rotorcraft, general aviation fixed-wing and the emerging electric vertical takeoff and landing (known as eVTOL) aircraft.

The company’s sensor integration software enables aircraft to perceive the world around it and reliably detect ground-based and airborne hazards and precisely determine the vehicle’s position.

This perception technology is the building block for autonomous aircraft, and also can be used to increase the operational envelope of current-day piloted aircraft, according to Xwing.

From here, the company’s Autonomy Flight Management System (AFMS) allows the aircraft to act upon the information from its surroundings. The system will integrate with air traffic control, generate flight paths to navigate the airspace, monitor system health and address all contingencies to ensure passenger safety, the company says.

Now, Xwing is in discussion with various, and still unnamed, large companies about integrating the system into their aircraft.