Karim Jalbout joins Lilium’s Senior Leadership Team as its new Chief People Officer

Lil­i­um has announced the appoint­ment of Karim Jal­bout to its Senior Lead­er­ship Team as Chief Peo­ple Offi­cer, who will begin his new role next month.

At Lil­i­um, Jal­bout will increase the Ger­man star­tup’s focus on per­son­al and lead­er­ship devel­op­ment and work with the senior lead­er­ship team and Board on con­tin­u­ing to build an engaged and moti­vat­ed cul­ture. He will catal­yse the organ­i­sa­tion in attract­ing and devel­op­ing lead­ers for the grow­ing glob­al Lil­i­um team.

Daniel Wie­gand, Lilium’s Co-Founder and CEO, said: “I’m delight­ed to wel­come Karim to Lil­i­um. He will play a cru­cial role in sup­port­ing and grow­ing our team as we pur­sue our mis­sion of build­ing rad­i­cal­ly bet­ter ways of mov­ing. Karim’s expe­ri­ence of work­ing side-by-side with every­one from engi­neers through to investors means that he has the ide­al back­ground for our team.”

Before join­ing Lil­i­um, Jal­bout served as a lead part­ner for Pri­vate Equi­ty & Tech­nol­o­gy at Egon Zehn­der, the glob­al lead­er­ship advi­so­ry and exec­u­tive search firm.

In this role, he advised list­ed and high growth glob­al com­pa­nies on trans­for­ma­tion­al lead­er­ship, exec­u­tive search, tal­ent poten­tial, board and team effec­tive­ness, IPO readi­ness and Diver­si­ty & Inclu­sion ini­tia­tives.

Pri­or to Egon Zehn­der, Karim led Glob­al Cus­tomer Propo­si­tions & Sales at Sony Eric­s­son Mobile where he worked close­ly with the prod­uct and soft­ware func­tions. He start­ed his career at Dia­geo where he held brand and com­mer­cial roles in North Amer­i­ca, Europe, Rus­sia and Africa.

Jal­bout added: “I am excit­ed to be join­ing an awe­some team at Lil­i­um to help build some­thing tru­ly vision­ary. This is a unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to rede­fine the future of mobil­i­ty by unleash­ing the poten­tial of our lead­ers to accel­er­ate deliv­er­ing our mis­sion of sus­tain­able air trav­el.”

2021 has been a busy year for Lil­i­um. As well as pub­licly trad­ing on NASDAQ after com­plet­ing a busi­ness merg­er with Qell Acquisi­ton Corp, it has announced sev­er­al mile­stones as it works towards launch­ing pas­sen­ger-car­ry­ing ser­vices with its Lil­i­um Jet from 2024.

These include ABB E‑mobility, which will pro­vide the charg­ing infra­struc­ture for Lilium’s high speed region­al air net­work, and CUSTOMCELLS, which will pro­duce the high-per­for­mance lithi­um-ion bat­ter­ies. Oth­er part­ner­ships with Aci­tur­ri, Hon­ey­well, Fer­rovial and Lux­avi­a­tion — as well as as air­ports in Munich, Nurem­berg and Stuttgart, have put Lil­i­um well on track to achiev­ing its objec­tives.