Autonomous vehicles have been in the headlines for several years thanks to $80B+ in funding, significant initiatives from several Fortune 100 corporations, almost every major car OEM and Tier 1s. Rightly so, given the massive potential for impact on safety and transportation of goods and people around the world.
Autonomous air transportation presents another opportunity for transformative impact in these areas.
Several factors make air transportation an even better candidate for automation. Air transportation, unlike roads, is a lot more structured and regulated. And hence, automating air transportation is a relatively more defined problem to solve. Some of the underlying technology also already exists. Additionally, customer demand for just-in-time delivery of goods is increasing at a fast pace and is super hard to fulfill without increasing the air cargo capacity significantly (which can only happen by making flights autonomous). Now is an opportune moment for a capable team to have a profound impact on the way we move by automating flight.
Enter Reliable Robotics. Reliable Robotics is revolutionizing commercial aviation with its autonomous flight technology. The company’s systems will not only make air travel safer, they will also lower the cost of moving people and goods through the sky. The global commercial aviation industry is a $550B market which is just a small fraction of the $6.6 Trillion global transportation market. With autonomous flights, commercial aviation will look very different than it does today. Reliable Robotics will make aircraft operations more convenient by enabling truly on-demand services and unlocking new business models. This has the potential of expanding the share of commercial aviation significantly and unlocking the path to making this a $1 Trillion market.
Building an autonomous air transportation company requires a different approach than the traditional “move fast, break things” mindset of startups. You need not only to innovate on the technology but also to intimately understand how to navigate within the aviation industry and work closely with the FAA to ensure compliance and safety.
This is exactly why Reliable Robotics stands out. Robert Rose (Co-Founder and CEO) led flight software at SpaceX and the Autopilot program at Tesla, launching the Falcon 9 rocket, Dragon spacecraft, and the first consumer automobile with fully unassisted self-driving capability. Co-founder and VP of Engineering Juerg Frefel led the team developing the compute platform for the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft. Other senior members of the team have played key roles in the development of the Boeing 787, Airbus A380 and other major commercial aircraft and avionics systems. Robert and Juerg both understand the path to flight certification and are taking the steps needed to achieve this. When we met them and learned about their well thought out plans to progressively bring this sort of automation to fruition, we knew we needed to partner with them.
Today, Reliable Robotics is emerging from stealth with $33.5M in funding with Series A round led by Lightspeed and the Series B led by our friends at Eclipse Ventures.
In the less than three years since Lightspeed partnered with the company, Robert and Juerg have built an exceptional team, developed the core technology, and achieved some historic firsts for global commercial aviation by completing successful test flights of remote-piloted passenger airplanes in U.S. airspace. The company designed and built a proprietary autonomous platform that includes avionics, software, mechanisms, a communications system, and remote command interfaces, complete with a backup system that has the capability to take over if needed.
In their demonstration of the industry’s first autonomous flight, Reliable Robotics commandeered the automatic taxi, takeoff, and landing of a 2,550 pound, unmanned, four passenger Cessna 172 Skyhawk. Most recently, the company demonstrated fully automated remote landing of an even larger aircraft, the Cessna 208 Caravan, capable of carrying 14 passengers. This demonstrated the broad generalizability of their autonomous platform which can be adapted to any fixed-wing aircraft.
At Lightspeed, we’re excited about the real leadership that the Reliable Robotics team has demonstrated to date as they continue pushing the envelope of autonomous air transportation. We look forward to our ongoing partnership and watching them, quite literally, continue to take flight.
Learn more about Reliable Robotics and the future of autonomous aviation in this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_afB7GzBY7w
— Raviraj Jain and Barry Eggers
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