SkyDrive raises ¥3.9 billion in latest Series B funding round

Fol­low­ing the suc­cess of its pub­lic flight demo last week, Sky­Drive has announced that it has raised ¥3.9 bil­lion in Series B fund­ing.

Sev­en of the ten investors — Devel­op­ment Bank of Japan, Itochu Cor­po­ra­tion, ENEOS Inno­va­tion Part­ners, Obayashi Cor­po­ra­tion, NEC Cor­po­ra­tion, VeriS­erve Cor­po­ra­tion and Sum­it­o­mo Mit­sui Finance and Leas­ing Com­pa­ny — are all new.

ITOCHU Tech­nol­o­gy Ven­tures, Ener­gy and Envi­ron­ment Invest­ment and STRIVE have added addi­tion­al invest­ment fol­low­ing Series A fund­ing. Oth­er exist­ing share­hold­ers include DRONE FUND and Z Cor­po­ra­tion. The amount equates to approx­i­mate­ly $37 mil­lion

Com­ment­ing on the invest­ment, Tomo­hi­ro Fukuza­wa, Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Direc­tor at Sky­Drive, said: “Sky­Drive will accel­er­ate its tech­no­log­i­cal and busi­ness devel­op­ment of fly­ing cars and car­go drones to build a soci­ety with safe, secure, and com­fort­able air mobil­i­ty solu­tions.

“On the tech­no­log­i­cal front, our man­age­ment of fly­ing car devel­op­ment will progress from the engi­neer­ing ver­i­fi­ca­tion phase to the air­wor­thi­ness ver­i­fi­ca­tion phase with the aim of achiev­ing a high degree of per­fec­tion of the aircraft’s body.”

Yasunori Yaza­ki, Pres­i­dent of ENEOS Inno­va­tion Part­ners, added: “The company’s vehi­cles have the poten­tial of fun­da­men­tal­ly chang­ing the next gen­er­a­tion of urban air mobil­i­ty, and are an excit­ing glimpse into the future. The ENEOS group will pri­mar­i­ly focus on build­ing the infra­struc­ture for fly­ing cars and drones and on cre­at­ing an ener­gy sup­ply sys­tem for the vehi­cles to help cre­ate a sus­tain­able new mobil­i­ty ser­vice.”

As well as devel­op­ing its SD-03 sin­gle-seater ‘fly­ing car’, which is hoped to be avail­able to buy in Japan from 2023, Sky­Drive is also work­ing to devel­op heavy-load spe­cif­ic car­go drones.

Fukuza­wa added that the com­pa­ny will ‘con­tin­ue to build and oper­ate indus­tri­al mod­els that can help over­come the chal­lenges con­fronting our cus­tomers by pro­vid­ing a means of trans­porta­tion in moun­tain areas.’

“We expect to expand our car­go drone ser­vice to urban areas in 2022 and beyond and to that end we will vig­or­ous­ly step up our efforts to build safe and secure air­craft and cre­ate the nec­es­sary ser­vice net­work to sup­port that expan­sion,” he added.