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#Wingcopter series xplorer capitaletheringtontechcrunch software#
But at some point, you realize you want to really plan with that revenue, so you want to have monthly revenues, which generally repeat like a software business - like software as a service.” “Basically, just by selling drones and creating revenue, we could employ our first 30 employees. “We were really lucky to bootstrap over the last four years,” Plümmer said. In the early days, Plümmer says Wingcopter had been approached by VCs, but at the time it didn’t make sense for what they were trying to do that’s changed. But Plümmer says the company saw so much potential in the technology it had developed and the emerging drone delivery market, that the exponential growth curve of its drone-delivery-as-a-service model helped make traditional VC backing make sense. Linear growth with solid revenue and steady demand was fine for Wingcopter as a bootstrapped startup founded by university students supported by a small initial investment from family and friends. Also looking at scalability of the business model of being an OEM, it’s kind of linear.” This was actually becoming a really good source of income and ended up actually making up more than half of our revenue at some point. “We learned during this process, through applying for permission, receiving these permissions and working now in five continents in multiple countries, flying BVLOS, that actually operating drones is something we are now very good at,” he said. After doing the hard work of building its technology from the ground up and seeking out the necessary regulatory approvals to operate in multiple markets around the world, Plümmer says that he and his co-founders realized that operating a service business not only meant a new source of revenue, but also better served the needs of many of its potential customers. While Wingcopter has so far pursued a business as an OEM manufacturer of drones and has had paying customers eager to purchase its hardware effectively since day one (Plümmer told me that they had at least one customer wiring them money before they even had a bank account set up for the business), but it’s also now getting into the business of offering drone delivery as a service. Wingcopter has already been operating commercially in a few different markets globally, including in Vanuatu in partnership with Unicef for vaccine delivery to remote areas, in Tanzania for two-way medical supply delivery and in Ireland where it completed the world’s first delivery of insulin by drone beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS), the industry’s technical term for when a drone flies beyond the visual range of a human operator who has the ability to take control in case of emergencies. Wingcopter CEO and founder Tom Plümmer explained in an interview that the addition of an SV-based investor is particularly important to the startup, since it’s in the process of preparing its entry into the U.S., with plans for an American facility, both for flight testing to satisfy FAA requirements for operational certification, as well as eventually for U.S.-based drone production.
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This new Series A round was led by Silicon Valley VC Xplorer Capital, as well as German growth fund Futury Regio Growth. The company, which focuses on drone delivery, has come a long way since its founding in 2017, having developed, built and flown its Wingcopter 178 heavy-lift cargo delivery drone using its proprietary and patented tilt-rotor propellant mechanism, which combines all the benefits of vertical take-off and landing with the advantages of fixed-wing aircraft for longer-distance horizontal flight. German drone technology startup Wingcopter has raised a $22 million Series A – its first significant venture capital raise after mostly bootstrapping. After bootstrapping for four years, this drone startup is ready to scale fast –