Participated · Series B · Apr 2025

Electra develops hybrid-electric Ultra Short aircraft, with the nine-passenger EL9 integrating blown lift technology and hybrid-electric propulsion. The EL9 can take off and land in 150 feet, carry up to 3,000 pounds of payload, and has a range of up to 1,100 nautical miles with in-flight battery recharging. Electra positions the aircraft for dual commercial and defense use, emphasizing quiet operation, lower operating costs versus helicopters and eVTOLs, and the ability to operate from unimproved surfaces. The company reports over 2,200 pre-orders valued at more than $10 billion and has won 20+ SBIR contracts from the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy and NASA, including a Strategic Funding Increase contract with the U.S. Air Force. Electra has grown to roughly 80 employees and markets the EL9 as the flagship of a future family of hybrid-electric aircraft aimed at enabling "Direct Aviation." The near-term plan centers on moving the EL9 into pre-production and certification. Electra.aero builds clean, hybrid-electric ultra-short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) aircraft intended to carry passengers and cargo. Led by founder and CEO John S. Langford, the company unveiled the EL-2 Goldfinch two-seat technology demonstrator in June 2023. Its planned production eSTOL is designed to carry nine passengers up to 500 miles as a sustainable alternative to regional driving. The company intends to use new funding to further develop its hybrid-electric eSTOL aircraft and advance flight testing. Electra currently holds over 1,200 aircraft pre-orders from more than 30 global customers, including established operators and new entrants. The company will begin flight testing the two-seat technology demonstrator later this summer. Electra.aero builds hybrid-electric ultra-short takeoff and landing (eSTOL) aircraft using patent-pending distributed electric propulsion and blown lift technology. Its designs aim to operate from spaces as small as 300x100 feet and use a small turbine-powered generator to recharge batteries in flight, reducing the need for ground charging infrastructure. Electra is designing aircraft that can carry up to 1,800 pounds of cargo or 7–9 passengers for up to 500 miles, targeting missions from intracity on-demand flights to medical and cargo transport. The company positions its technology as quieter, more environmentally friendly, and lower cost to operate than many vertical takeoff alternatives, and cites support from NASA and the U.S. Air Force Agility Prime program. Electra plans to begin flight testing a full-scale hybrid eSTOL technology demonstrator later in the year, and the company announced strategic investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures to support that work.

Participated · Series A · Nov 2023

Blackshark.ai created a digital twin of Earth and sells tools that let users interpret and act on orbital and aerial imagery. Its new product, Orca Huntr, is a no-code, scribble-driven interface that lets users quickly build and refine object-detection models from imagery. The company was born out of the gaming industry and emphasizes a platform that digests widely varying data sources and epochs. Blackshark.ai has exclusive access to Maxar’s satellite archive, which it uses to train and contextualize models. Customers range from governments, scientists and military users to real-estate developers and industrial clients; many ask the company to verticalize the service into end-to-end solutions. The team says the model can generalize beyond orbital imagery to domains like medical or microscopic industrial imagery and is exploring OEM introductions. The company will make Orca Huntr available to paying customers on December 4, and declined to provide pricing details. Blackshark.ai is an Austrian startup that converts widely available 2D imagery into accurate, traversable 3D reconstructions using machine learning and large-scale computing. Its technology powered the fully traversable globe in Microsoft’s Flight Simulator and can extrapolate building geometry by analysing context such as neighborhood type and roof characteristics. The company has accelerated its 2D-to-3D processing from about a month of computation to roughly three days—an approximately 300x improvement. Blackshark.ai positions its product as a searchable surface of the planet for use cases including climate modeling, disaster relief, smart cities, autonomous industries, and AR/VR. With the new funding it plans to hire more engineers and researchers and to scale commercial operations by building sales, support, and other pieces required for hyperscaling. Financially, the company raised a $20 million Series A to develop and scale its replica-Earth technology.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2022

Outsight builds real-time 3D LiDAR perception software that ingests data from any LiDAR vendor to enable situational awareness for Smart Cities, Aviation, Robotics, Industry and Logistics. Its core product addresses vendor heterogeneity and massive raw-data challenges by providing Edge processing and a new Cloud-based pipeline capable of handling tens of petabytes for dynamic scenes. Outsight’s solutions have been deployed across Europe, the United States, Asia and the Middle East and include the largest airport LiDAR deployment tested at Paris-Charles de Gaulle (Groupe ADP). The company emphasizes plug-and-play integration so application developers and integrators can harness LiDAR without deep 3D expertise. Outsight plans to push an ambitious product roadmap — notably Edge and Cloud processing, Digital Twin use cases, and automatic 3D data annotation. The company announced a $22 million fundraising to support expansion and accelerate its product and go-to-market plans. Outsight builds a 3D Semantic Camera — an all-in-one 3D sensing device that both perceives and understands the environment and can identify object material composition. The company offers two product families: a 3D Smart Monitoring solution for wide-area premises (airports, malls, venues) and a vehicle-specific version for cars and off-road mobile robots. The sensor is designed for mass production and was launched in September at AutoSens. Outsight positions the technology to improve safety and reliability for manned machines (Level 1–3 ADAS) and to enable fully automated machines including Level 4–5 self-driving cars, robots, drones, and autonomous flying taxis. Founded in 2019, the team is based in Paris with offices in Helsinki and San Francisco. Financially, Outsight completed a $20 million seed round in 2019, one of the largest European seed rounds that year.

Participated · Series A · Jan 2022

Ineratec develops modular chemical plants for Power-to-X and gas-to-liquid applications that convert hydrogen from renewable electricity and greenhouse gases such as CO2 into e-kerosene, CO2-neutral gasoline, clean diesel, synthetic waxes, methanol and SNG. The company supplies sustainable e-fuels and chemical products and has implemented industrial-scale power-to-liquid plants at German sites, including use cases in aviation. Founded in 2016 and based in Karlsruhe, Germany, Ineratec is expanding internationally with projects in the Netherlands and Chile and is constructing its largest plant to date in Frankfurt. The firm intends to use the new capital to begin mass production of industrial-scale Power-to-X plants worldwide and advance e-fuel production from recycled CO2 and renewable energy. Management is led by Philipp Engelkamp, Ingo Katz, Tim Boeltken and Caspar Schuchmann. Financially, the company completed a major Series B raise in January 2024. Ineratec develops modular chemical plants and compact reactor technology for Power-to-X and Gas-to-Liquid/Power-to-Liquid processes that convert renewable electricity and CO2 into synthetic fuels and chemical feedstocks. Its compact reactors are transportable in containers, offer high load flexibility and quick start-up/shutdown times, and enable a decentralized, modular numbering-up approach suited to fluctuating wind and solar power. The company aims to decarbonize aviation, shipping, automotive and chemical industries by supplying sustainable e-fuels and materials and says it will scale production toward the megaton scale. Ineratec opened a pilot e-kerosene plant in Emsland in 2021 and planned an industrial pioneer plant near Frankfurt Airport for production starting in 2022. The company states that up to 4.6 million litres of e-fuels can be produced annually from up to 10,000 tons of biogenic CO2 and renewable electricity at its planned facility. Founded in 2014 by Tim Böltken, Philipp Engelkamp and Paolo Piermartini (with Prof. Peter Pfeifer/KIT), Ineratec is based in Karlsruhe, Germany.