Wingcopter raises $42 million with multi-million-dollar delivery drone orders

Wing­copter has raised $42 mil­lion from Ger­man retail­er REWE Group, and Ger­man investors Salvia and XAI tech­nolo­gies as new share­hold­ers, tripling the company’s equi­ty to more than $60 mil­lion.

REWE Group is one of Germany’s largest gro­cery retail­ers with 12,000 stores across Europe while Salvia is known for its invest­ment in Ger­man biotech cham­pi­on BioN­Tech. They are joined by Japan­ese con­glom­er­ate Itochu, Futu­ry Cap­i­tal from Ger­many and Sil­i­con Val­ley-based Xplor­er Cap­i­tal.

Found­ed by machine vision pio­neer Enis Ersü, XAI tech­nolo­gies has expe­ri­ence in sen­sor tech­nol­o­gy and indus­tri­al automa­tion, while Itochu is one of Japan’s largest trad­ing com­pa­nies list­ed in the For­tune Glob­al 500 index.

Wing­copter will be able to expand its drone deliv­ery ser­vices and ramp up pro­duc­tion of the Wing­copter 198, hav­ing expe­ri­enced grow­ing demand and already sold most pro­duc­tion slots for this year and the next, and hire 80 new employ­ees.

This comes short­ly after the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) approved the Air­wor­thi­ness Cri­te­ria for the Wing­copter 198, which marked a crit­i­cal mile­stone in the US Type Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion Process of the company’s flag­ship air­craft.

Wing­copter co-founder and CEO Tom Plüm­mer said: “We are hir­ing pas­sion­ate pio­neers with whom to build what has not exist­ed before. The new fund­ing, com­bined with grow­ing rev­enues, puts us in an excel­lent posi­tion to estab­lish our indus­try-lead­ing drone deliv­ery solu­tion with cus­tomers around the globe.”

REWE Group exec­u­tive board mem­ber Christoph Eltze added: “For years, we have relied on strong part­ner­ships with inno­va­tion lead­ers, and we have found such a part­ner with Wing­copter.”

Salvia founder and man­ag­ing part­ner Hel­mut Jeg­gle con­tin­ued: “With its dis­rup­tive tech­nol­o­gy and high­ly moti­vat­ed team, Wing­copter has the poten­tial to become a fron­trun­ner in drone deliv­ery, and we are pleased to accom­pa­ny this suc­cess as an investor and part­ner.”

XAI tech­nolo­gies man­ag­ing own­er Enis Ersü explained: “We are excit­ed to join the Wing­copter team as leader in drone deliv­ery logis­tics as investor and tech­nol­o­gy part­ner, with our team very much look­ing for­ward to gen­er­at­ing fur­ther busi­ness poten­tial.”

Wingcopter’s recent part­ner­ship agree­ment with Con­ti­nen­tal Drones aims to deploy 12,000 drones in sub-Saha­ran Africa. Syn­er­jet is an autho­rised Wing­copter part­ner in Latin Amer­i­ca, while Itochu is an autho­rised Wing­copter part­ner in Japan.

In Feb­ru­ary, Wing­copter and Spright, a sub­sidiary of lead­ing US air med­ical ser­vice provider Air Meth­ods, announced a com­mer­cial agree­ment worth more than $16 mil­lion for Spright to acquire a large fleet of the Wing­copter 198 to meet the increas­ing demand for med­ical drone deliv­ery.