Zuri CEO Michal Illich pre­sent­ed his company’s invest­ment round to inter­est­ed investors at the Sus­tain­able Skies World Sum­mit in Farn­bor­ough. The pre-series‑A round is planned to be up to €1.5M, with €400k already secured and received by the com­pa­ny in the last month.

On April 19th to 22nd Zuri was one of the exhibitors at the AERO Friedrichshafen air­show with a crew com­posed of skilled engi­neers and design­ers. Vis­i­tors were able to expe­ri­ence what it would be like to fly the Zuri, either as pilots or as pas­sen­gers using a sim­u­la­tor and VR head­sets.

The exhib­it also dis­played Zuri’s new 3MV1_NG ver­ti­cal take­off air­craft with a wingspan of 3.4 meters and weight of 25 kg, which belongs to the open cat­e­go­ry of unmanned air­craft.

For Zuri this sub­scale mod­el is a valu­able tool to test the tran­si­tion between ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal mode and ver­i­fy flight char­ac­ter­is­tics for the design of the Zuri 5‑seater VTOL. Zuri was part of the AERO Sus­tain­able Avi­a­tion Recep­tion.

Prague-based Zuri is devel­op­ing hybrid-elec­tric VTOL air­craft capa­ble of trans­port­ing pas­sen­gers and car­go at dis­tances up to 700 km, mak­ing the Zuri hybrid VTOL sig­nif­i­cant­ly dif­fer­ent from com­pa­nies which use elec­tric­i­ty exclu­sive­ly to pow­er their air­craft, there­by lim­it­ing the range.

Zuri 2.0 basic para­me­ters
Range: 700 km (435 miles) plus a 30-minute reserve
Cruis­ing speed: 300–350 km/h (186+ mph)
Pow­er units: 8 tilt­ing elec­tric motors
On-board gen­er­a­tor: tur­bine with an elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tor for pow­er­ing elec­tric motors and recharg­ing Lithi­um bat­ter­ies.

In Octo­ber 2022, sig­nif­i­cant changes in the design of the Zuri hybrid eVTOL were made as a result of tech­nol­o­gy demon­stra­tor tests, sub­scale mod­els, aero­dy­nam­ics sim­u­la­tions and com­plex cal­cu­la­tions.