PODCAST: Jakob Saalfrank of Grasshopper Air Mobility talks Sustainability, Scalability and its Blueprint for Cargo Drones

Our lat­est pod­cast episode is now live! This week, we were delight­ed to be joined by Jakob Saal­frank, Founder and CEO of Grasshop­per Air Mobil­i­ty.

In this episode, Jakob shares his jour­ney from work­ing in logis­tics and ware­house automa­tion to found­ing Grasshop­per Air Mobil­i­ty in 2023, dri­ven by a vision for sus­tain­able, autonomous aer­i­al mobil­i­ty.

Ini­tial­ly inspired by fly­ing cars for com­muters, he and his team piv­ot­ed to car­go oper­a­tions after rec­og­niz­ing the steep cer­ti­fi­ca­tion costs and bar­ri­ers fac­ing pas­sen­ger eVTOLs.

Jakob reflects on key indus­try lessons and the com­pa­ny’s strat­e­gy to lever­age off-the-shelf, cer­ti­fied com­po­nents rather than devel­op­ing every­thing in-house. The com­pa­ny is firm­ly com­mit­ted to sus­tain­abil­i­ty, with a focus on elec­tric and hybrid-hydro­gen propul­sion and ultra-qui­et duct­ed fan tech­nol­o­gy.

Look­ing ahead, Grasshop­per is tar­get­ing cer­ti­fi­ca­tion between 2030–2031, with scaled pro­to­types begin­ning as ear­ly as 2026. Jakob also dis­cuss­es the chal­lenges of reg­u­la­tion, infra­struc­ture inte­gra­tion, fund­ing, and the impor­tance of pub­lic accep­tance for advanced air mobil­i­ty to suc­ceed glob­al­ly.

Click on the Play but­ton below to lis­ten to the episode, which is avail­able on whichev­er pod­cast plat­form you use.