It is a classic of adventure books that if you want to hide then go up a tree, as most people’s eyes are firmly fixed on the ground immediately in front of them.
In transport, most mobility solutions have been aimed at the ways of moving on the Earth’s surface, whether land or water. Another way, of course, has been to target the airspace above the city.
Blade, a US-based short-distance aviation company best known for helicopter rides from airports to city centres in New York City, agreed in December to go public via an $850m reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) affiliated with KSL Capital Partners.
Blade had been backed by aircraft maker Airbus back in March 2018 but is reaping potential longer-term trends as, according to Morgan Stanley Equity Research, urban air mobility is expected to be a $125bn market by 2025.
Airbus has been working on a zero-emission concept aircraft, Zeroe, based on hydrogen as well as CityAirbus, an all-electric, four-seat, multicopter vehicle, that might enable Blade to move into electric vertical take-off and landing by the mid-point of the decade.
It is up against a startup in ZeroAvia among others. The company was identified in our previous Global Energy Council report for receiving UK grant funding to fly a small aircraft using hydrogen power and subsequently raised $21.4m from corporate backers Amazon through its Climate Pledge Fund, aircraft maker Boeing’s Horizons Ventures unit and oil major Shell’s corporate venturing unit, as well as venture capital firms Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Ecosystem Integrity Fund and Summa Equity.
Eric Toone, the executive managing director and science lead at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the venture firm backed by Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, and Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates, among others, told TechCrunch: “I am a big believer in hydrogen from the perspective that if I have enough zero carbon hydrogen, and it’s cheap enough, then I can do anything.”
Kara Hurst, vice-president for worldwide sustainability at Amazon, added to the news provider: “ZeroAvia’s zero-emission aviation powertrain has real potential to help decarbonize the aviation sector, and we hope this investment will further accelerate the pace of innovation to enable zero-emission air transport at scale.”
As ZeroAvia founder Val Miftakhov has noted: “Batteries are not energy dense enough for the amount of energy you need for the aircraft.
“Aviation is the most energy intensive form of transit… and you can’t stop in the middle.”
But if you lift your sights even higher then stopping (relatively) does become possible.
Orbit Fab, a US-based startup preparing to establish gas stations in space, has raised $6m in its seed round with Germany-based insurer Munich Re’s corporate venturing unit extending the round.
Munich Re is already a provider of insurance for satellite operators and hired Timur Davis as a principal in 2019 to build out its deep tech investment theses, including to cover space.
All these deals in new areas help explain why the “other transport” subsector has seen a spike in deal values in the past year.
