Dufour Aerospace secures additional funding to accelerate growth of its hybrid eVTOL passenger aircraft

Dufour Aero­space has secured addi­tion­al fund­ing from session.vc and exist­ing investors, which will help to take its hybrid eVTOL pas­sen­ger air­craft into pre-pro­duc­tion and cer­ti­fi­ca­tion.

The Swiss start­up was found­ed four years ago by Thomas Pfam­mat­ter, Dominique Stef­fen and Jas­mine Kent and the team includes for­mer engi­neers from Air­bus, Boe­ing, Google and Solar Impulse.

Its eVTOL plat­form is based on proven tilt-wing tech­nol­o­gy, which gives the air­craft the abil­i­ty to not only con­duct a ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing, but also the abil­i­ty to cruise more effi­cient­ly.

The com­pa­ny achieved fur­ther suc­cess with the con­struc­tion of its large-scale pro­to­type eVTOL air­craft and the com­ple­tion of more than 600 test flights, includ­ing full tran­si­tion from hov­er to cruise and back.

This makes it the only Euro­pean eVTOL start­up to show pub­licly full tran­si­tions on large scale air­craft so far. The pro­to­type was designed as a research plat­form, with a mod­u­lar ener­gy bay that allows both pure-elec­tric and hybrid-elec­tric equip­ment to be installed.

session.vc was found­ed in 2020 by Mar­tin Altor­fer and Philippe Bubb. In the past, the two have sup­port­ed and active­ly accom­pa­nied suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies such as Bexio, On and Nut­meg as angel investors. session.vc is sup­port­ed by their own cap­i­tal and that of entre­pre­neurs from the tech and con­sumer indus­tries.

Bubb, is excit­ed to share the suc­cess­es of the lat­est devel­op­ments with Dufour Aero­space. He said: “We have been accom­pa­ny­ing the team around CEO and Air Zer­matt pilot Thomas Pfam­mat­ter for over two years and are excit­ed by the company’s devel­op­ment.

“Dufour Aero­space is elec­tri­fy­ing a proven aero­dy­nam­ic con­cept with exist­ing bat­tery tech­nol­o­gy. With the aEro3 it can cov­er around 80 per cent of the areas of appli­ca­tion for which heli­copters are used today and thus address­es a mul­ti-bil­lion-dol­lar mar­ket with sus­tain­able tech­nol­o­gy.”

Based on this suc­cess, the com­pa­ny is cur­rent­ly devel­op­ing the aEro3 pas­sen­ger air­craft, a manned tilt-wing air­craft for med­ical trans­port and region­al air mobil­i­ty pur­pos­es.

The ful­ly inte­grat­ed pro­pri­etary hard­ware and soft­ware allows for full con­trol over all the crit­i­cal com­po­nents of the air­craft, rep­re­sent­ing a mile­stone in ver­ti­cal mobil­i­ty. The aEro3 pas­sen­ger air­craft has a hybrid range of 1,000km and, with its ver­sa­tile appli­ca­tions in urban air­space, opens up enor­mous mar­ket poten­tial. The next step is to build the pro­to­type of the hybrid eVTOL pas­sen­ger air­craft.

Thomas Pfam­mat­ter, CEO of Dufour Aero­space, said: “The ver­sa­til­i­ty of the hybrid propul­sion sys­tem allows us to address large already exist­ing mar­kets, such as the enor­mous mar­ket for emer­gency med­ical ser­vices, which is cur­rent­ly served by heli­copters and ambu­lances.

“Our tilt-wing air­craft mod­els with hybrid propul­sion are not only resource-effi­cient, but also sig­nif­i­cant­ly qui­eter than cur­rent deployed heli­copters. We are thus cre­at­ing deci­sive advan­tages for use in urban air mobil­i­ty. With the fur­ther devel­op­ment of our pro­to­type, we want to push these advan­tages fur­ther and thus open up numer­ous oth­er pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions.”