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Zuri hybrid eVTOL announces investment opportunity and AERO show stand

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.

Boris Sedacca

Boris produces the editorial content for eVTOL Insights and covers many topics, including batteries, powertrains, certification, public acceptance, landing and charging infrastructure. Please reach out to him with any potential stories via editorial@evtolinsights.com

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