SkyDrive Secures Additional Funding from Suzuki Motor Corporation 

Sky­Drive, the lead­ing Japan­ese eVTOL air­craft man­u­fac­tur­er, announced this week, it has secured addi­tion­al fund­ing after its pre­vi­ous Series C round via a third-par­ty allot­ment of new shares to busi­ness part­ner, Suzu­ki Motor Cor­po­ra­tion, reports a press release. This finance will accel­er­ate the devel­op­ment and man­u­fac­tur­ing of SkyDrive’s SD-05 two-pas­sen­ger eVTOL air­craft. 

The com­pa­ny had already secured cumu­la­tive fund­ing close to 15 bil­lion yen (just over USD103 mil­lion) from 13 dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, by April 2023. Pre­vi­ous­ly, in Sep­tem­ber 2022, the com­pa­ny had suc­cess­ful­ly attract­ed 9.6 bil­lion yen, helped by MUFG Bank, one of Japan’s largest finan­cial insti­tu­tions, as well as new invest­ment from Mura­ta Man­u­fac­tur­ing. 

Mean­while, Sky­Drive and Suzu­ki are joint­ly and present­ly exhibit­ing at the Glob­al Trade Show at the Gujarat Glob­al Sum­mit 2024 (Jan­u­ary 9th to 13th) in the State of Gujarat, India. Busi­ness Days are 10th and 11th, and Pub­lic Days 12th and 13th. The part­ners are locat­ed in the Heli­pad Exhi­bi­tion Cen­tre, Hall 2.

This trade show is one of the largest exhi­bi­tions in the world for “cut­ting-edge tech­nol­o­gy.” Sky­Drive is exhibit­ing its 1/5 scaled SD-05 at the Maru­ti-Suzu­ki India Ltd booth. The part­ners are explor­ing poten­tial busi­ness devel­op­ment for the Indi­an mar­ket.

The SD-05 is pilot­ed with a max­i­mum cruise speed of 62mph; has 12 pro­pel­lors pow­ered by 12 elec­tric motors; with a range of up to 6 miles; and a flight time of close to 10 min­utes. This makes Sky­Drive a short haul air­craft com­pared to some of its longer range com­peti­tors.

Mean­while, the com­pa­ny aims to launch an air taxi ser­vice at the Osa­ka Expo in 2025, where the SD-05 hopes to fly large num­bers of the pub­lic to and from the event dur­ing a six month peri­od.

Sky­Drive plans to begin pro­duc­tion of its eVTOL Air­craft in the Spring of 2024 at the Suzu­ki plant head­quar­tered in Iwa­ta-city, Shizuo­ka Pre­fec­ture. Tomo­hi­ro Fukuza­wa is the com­pa­ny CEO.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://www.vibrantgujarat.com/tradeshow

https://en.skydrive2020.com/

(Images: Sky­Drive)