Lilium appoints Oliver Vogelgesang as CFO and Sebastien Borel as CCO

Lil­i­um has appoint­ed Oliv­er Vogelge­sang as chief finan­cial offi­cer (CFO) and Sebastien Borel as chief com­mer­cial offi­cer (CCO). Oliv­er will take over from Geof­frey Richard­son, who is step­ping down fol­low­ing a suc­cess­ful Lil­i­um list­ing on NASDAQ.

As expe­ri­enced aero­space exec­u­tives cur­rent­ly in senior lead­er­ship roles at Lil­i­um, Oliv­er and Sebastien will sup­port CEO Klaus Roewe in the con­tin­ued devel­op­ment of Lilium’s eVTOL jet.

Oliv­er joined Lil­i­um in July 2021 as senior VP of finance and con­trol, tasked with build­ing the con­trol­ling and investor rela­tions func­tions and bring­ing almost 30 years of finance and aero­space expe­ri­ence, most recent­ly serv­ing as man­ag­ing direc­tor of finance at Air­bus Ger­many and senior VP for the Air­bus A320 pro­gramme.

Pre­vi­ous­ly, he spent four years as VP Investor Rela­tions at Air­bus Group and held sev­er­al addi­tion­al roles in finance, pro­gramme man­age­ment, and restruc­tur­ing pro­grammes at Air­bus. He stud­ied aero­space engi­neer­ing at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich and holds an MBA from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Saar­brück­en.

Sebastien joined Lil­i­um in Novem­ber 2021 as busi­ness vice pres­i­dent and was appoint­ed senior VP Com­mer­cial in April 2022. Pri­or to join­ing Lil­i­um, Sebastien held var­i­ous key man­age­ment posi­tions at Hon­ey­well and Air­bus in addi­tion to his start-up expe­ri­ence in the US.

Since his start at Lil­i­um, he has finalised con­tracts for orders of more than 600 air­craft. He attend­ed the French mer­chant offi­cer acad­e­my and holds com­mer­cial pilot licences.

Geof­frey Richard­son joined the com­pa­ny in Novem­ber 2020 as chief finan­cial offi­cer, and was instru­men­tal in Lilium’s fundrais­ing, includ­ing tak­ing the com­pa­ny to a suc­cess­ful NASDAQ list­ing and more recent­ly clos­ing a $119 mil­lion cap­i­tal raise in the last quar­ter of 2022 from exist­ing share­hold­ers, new investors, and strate­gic part­ners.

He com­ment­ed: “I am proud to have per­son­al­ly con­tributed to lay­ing the struc­tur­al, finan­cial, and organ­i­sa­tion­al basis for Lil­i­um to suc­ceed in its mis­sion to accel­er­ate the decar­bon­i­sa­tion of avi­a­tion.

“This next phase of Lilium’s indus­tri­al­i­sa­tion requires a team effort with phys­i­cal pres­ence on site in Ger­many that I can­not deliv­er from Cal­i­for­nia. I am con­vinced Lil­i­um is on track to be the leader in intro­duc­ing elec­tric sus­tain­able flight.”

Lil­i­um chair­man Tom Enders added: “Geof­frey has deliv­ered to Lil­i­um what a Euro­pean avi­a­tion start-up could have nev­er achieved alone: an ear­ly, quick, and suc­cess­ful list­ing on NASDAQ that gave the com­pa­ny access to the pub­lic equi­ty mar­kets.

“Geof­frey brought togeth­er a high cal­i­bre group of long-term investors com­mit­ted to Lilium’s vision. As we begin build­ing our first pro­to­types, we are thrilled to have such proven senior exec­u­tives as Oliv­er and Sebastien to con­tin­ue the mis­sion along­side Klaus and the rest of the lead­er­ship team.”