“Kite Aero Purchases Liquidated Swoop Aero Assets”

Kite Aero, a new­ly formed uncrewed avi­a­tion com­pa­ny, has suc­cess­ful­ly acquired the assets of for­mer Aus­tralian-based drone deliv­ery com­pa­ny, Swoop Aero, reports a press release. The deal includes the Kite drone and Swoop’s acclaimed drone oper­a­tions soft­ware plat­form.

The acqui­si­tion ensures a con­ti­nu­ity for exist­ing autonomous aer­i­al logis­tics cus­tomers and cre­at­ing a stronger busi­ness oper­a­tion to build on the foun­da­tions the drone com­pa­ny estab­lished in the indus­try.

In Novem­ber, Swoop Aero’s cred­i­tors vot­ed to place the ven­ture cap­i­tal-backed busi­ness in to liq­ui­da­tion.

Swoop had raised more than USD26 mil­lion in VC fund­ing since being formed in 2017, but co-Founder and CEO, Eric Peck, placed the com­pa­ny in to vol­un­tary admin­is­tra­tion in Octo­ber, hop­ing a restruc­ture would deliv­er a path for­ward. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, a month lat­er, a sec­ond cred­i­tors’ meet­ing brought things to an end, just two years after a report­ed USD100 mil­lion takeover offer.

Peck told the cred­i­tors, “As a founder of the busi­ness, my focus now is on bring­ing the right finan­cial part­ners and key stake­hold­ers to the table to enable a suc­cess­ful restruc­ture.”

The creditor’s report revealed that the busi­ness lost USD9.3 mil­lion in FY2023, on the back of USD6.6 mil­lion in rev­enue. The report said the Direc­tors blamed the fail­ure on a lack of addi­tion­al cap­i­tal to com­plete and com­mer­cialise the final prod­uct.

Eric Peck

Four months lat­er Peck has kept his word.

The release explains, “Swoop, a glob­al leader in drone-based logis­tics, is wide­ly recog­nised for its rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nol­o­gy in autonomous deliv­ery, par­tic­u­lar­ly in crit­i­cal health­care sup­ply chains. Kite Aero has acquired these key assets, with a mis­sion to uphold and expand on Swoop’s achieve­ments.” 

Philip van der Burg, CEO of Kite Aero, com­ment­ed, “We are com­mit­ted to build­ing on the strong foun­da­tion that Swoop estab­lished. The Kite drone and soft­ware plat­form have already proven their val­ue in enabling scal­able drone logis­tics solu­tions, and we see tremen­dous poten­tial in tak­ing it to the next lev­el. Our goal is to con­tin­ue to enable safe, reli­able and impact­ful drone oper­a­tions to com­mu­ni­ties and busi­ness­es world­wide.” 

As part of its strate­gic vision, Kite, whose U.S par­ent com­pa­ny is a leader in aero­space tech­nol­o­gy, both defence and com­mer­cial, has opened up the soft­ware stack and avion­ics sys­tem to third-par­ty inte­gra­tion, allow­ing broad­er adop­tion and inter­op­er­abil­i­ty across the indus­try. 

This flight oper­at­ing sys­tem has logged more than 36,000 flights and over 20,000 flight hours. 

Open­ing the plat­form to third par­ties will empow­er part­ners and oper­a­tors to lever­age the tech­nol­o­gy for a wide range of appli­ca­tions, from logis­tics and emer­gency response to com­mer­cial drone ser­vices. 

Kite will also explore oppor­tu­ni­ties to re-engage for­mer Swoop employ­ees and indus­try part­ners to retain the exper­tise and inno­va­tion that drove Swoop’s suc­cess. 

It is unclear what Kite Aero paid for Swoop’s assets.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.kiteaerospace.com

(Images: Swoop/Kite)

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