Why we invested: Aerovolt

In 1885, Gaston Tissandier strapped a Siemens electric motor to an airship and flew for over an hour above the skies of Paris. This was nearly twenty years before the Wright Brothers took to the skies using a combustion engine to pioneer the aviation industry as we know it today.

For the following century, aviation was destined to be powered by carbon based fuels - not electricity. Conventional aviation fuel today, composed primarily of kerosene, offers 50 times more energy per kilogram than current lithium-ion batteries. The longest electric-only flight is less than 1% of what is possible in a jet-fuel-powered Airbus A350. And of the 19,000 privately owned planes registered in the UK today, just 10 are electric. 

But the skies of the future will look entirely different to the skies of today. 

Rapidly falling cost of batteries, emergence of new chemistries, an urgent need to decarbonize and key inflection points in autonomous technologies are bringing electric powered systems into the skies. 

Over the next 10 years new aircraft systems will emerge to transport people and goods in a far greener way than ever before. 

The model of centralised airports and long-haul flights will be complemented by  autonomous drones, eVTOLs and smaller electric aircraft providing local delivery, point to point passenger travel and a host of other services for a diverse range of industries.

Electric flight will be grounded without a comprehensive charging infrastructure and we backed Aerovolt to provide exactly that. Since we invested in 2023, Aerovolt has begun building and operating the world’s first electric charging network for electric air systems: a hardware and software stack to power and manage the future of electrified planes, UAVs, eVTOLs, air taxis and military vehicles.

Unlike car charging, you cannot simply stick a charger in the ground and get going. The flight regime for electric air vehicles of all types are governed by the Civil Aviation Authority (Federal Aviation Authority in the USA) and each aircraft must be certified to work with  specific chargers. The chargers themselves must be certified and you need the supporting software integration with aircraft, ATC and the pilot software aids which are ubiquitous today.

Defensibility is achieved by owning the relationship with the charging sites: the airfields and regional hubs that will represent the backbone of future national aviation, crucial to the adoption of drone delivery, eVTOLs and other next generation electric aircraft. 84% of general aviation flights operate from 134 of the larger aerodromes in the UK. The Aerovolt team already has relationships with most of these. With the complexity and features that an aviation charging network requires, there simply isn't room in the market for multiple CPO’s.