VerdeGo Aero, a startup aiming to accelerate the electrification of flight, raised $12 million in a Series A round from RTX ventures, the venture capital division of aerospace and defense company Raytheon Technologies. VerdeGo says it's creating power and propulsion technologies to enable other companies to develop high-performance electric aircraft, and to make the electrification of flight practical, useful, and scalable. Eric Bartsch, CEO of VerdeGo Aero, joined Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.

Closing Bell

VerdeGo Aero Raises $12 Million to Electrify Flight

vertigo. Arrow is aiming to accelerate the electrification of flight, raising $12 million in a series a round from R. TX Ventures, That's the venture capital division of aerospace and defense company Raytheon Technologies, vertigo says it's creating power and propulsion technologies to enable other companies to develop high performance electric aircraft and to make the electrification a flight practical, useful and scalable. So joining me now is eric Bartsch as ceo of vertigo. Eric good to have you on the show, Congratulations on the round. I want you to talk to me more about what you're offering. Thank you. Well, it's exciting to be here, Kristen and we're excited to grow vertigo a row to the next level. You know, really what we're seeing in the aerospace industry is the biggest wave of innovation that's happened since the 1930s. And really that's driven in large part by new technologies, including electrification and what we're finding is that electrification is changing the way aircraft look and changing what they can do just as the jet engine did the same for the aerospace market. And so verdi goes, Hybrid electric systems are what enable those electric aircraft to really be very capable and useful and ultimately scale up into the market and make a big impact, interesting, how far are we away from electric flight? ErIC Well, it depends on what you're asking there. So I, I first flew an electric airplane back in 2013. So they've been out there in very small numbers for quite a while in the research and development community. But I would say over the next five years we're going to start seeing electric aircraft that are really making a difference for smaller scale aircraft kind of moving progressively upmarket with different elements of electrification and that's really important as we tackle the sustainability of flight and electric and particularly a hybrid electric systems where you're using a sustainable fuel to power that aircraft and get many times the performance that you get out of a battery. That's going to be a critical way that we get the electrification of flight rolling. Give me some use cases here of an electric plane and how you're servicing those particular aircraft. Absolutely. So the electric planes that we're going to see first are likely to be short range aircraft, large drones. Think about how we move packages or cargo around cities, how we move people around cities, how we get people to and from the 5000 underutilized airports in this country. There there's a lot of infrastructure that already exists in aerospace, but we don't have an efficient way to unl that. And so by electrifying an aircraft, we make it greener. We also bring the operating costs down and really expand the market for who can benefit from those services. So, you know, in the long term, you can think about how do you get back and forth across Los Angeles or new york or shanghai quickly. You know, there are ways of creating something that acts like a helicopter but is a lot quieter and a lot more efficient and a lot cheaper to operate and really bring that to bring that experience to a lot more people so that we can get around congested cities more quickly. So I do find it interesting that Raytheon Technologies, a publicly traded company invested in your firm, obviously has its own aerospace and defense focus at that particular firm is Raytheon a potential client for you going forward. So they are a potential client and partner and and collaborator. And we're currently exploring a lot of different ways that we can really leverage the things that a small nimble startup can do really well and at the same time the things that a large established aerospace company can do really well and it's exciting to align the two together. Um you know, as you mentioned, our TX Ventures is the venture capital arm of Raytheon. They also own the Pratt and Whitney aircraft engines division. And so, you know, Pratt and Whitney is a, you know, one of the historic powerhouses of aerospace propulsion and so it's, it's very exciting to see what what you can accomplish with a, with a startup aligned with a, you know, a major established player in the industry erIC this is so fascinating, you're so well spoken, I want to get your take on this, I'm sure charging these electric aircraft probably takes a lot of power. What is the charging process? Like how long do you think it'll take to charge some of these vehicles? Well, you know, that's a very good question. And it's an interesting challenge. And actually, because we're doing hybrid electric systems, what we're doing is tapping into all of the work that's being done on sustainable fuels in the aerospace industry. And it's interesting because when we think about electric cars, everyone thinks about batteries and, and rightly so when we think about electric airplanes, really, electric motors are actually the big revolution in electric flight. You can control them more easily, You can have a lot of them on an aircraft efficiently and you can really break the rules for what an aircraft looks like. You know what we're used to seeing. And so just as a jet airplane looks very different than, you know, a 19 thirties, vintage propeller airplane, an electric airplane is going to look different than a jet or different than a conventional propeller airplane and perhaps more like a drone where you've got a whole lot of different power plants on the aircraft. It can be more maneuverable. You can kind of blur the lines between the aerodynamics and the propulsion and the control and get it to do things you couldn't do before efficiently. And so what we do is actually allow sustainable liquid fuels. So manufactured liquid fuels to be used to go into the plane such that you don't need to wait to charge the aircraft and you don't need to worry about charging infrastructure. We can use the infrastructure we have, we can use new types of fuels that leverage that infrastructure and we can very quickly put those into the aircraft, operate the aircraft and have all the performance that we need. Well also having all of the benefits that the electric motor brings to designing a new aircraft that is fundamentally more efficient and capable of doing things we couldn't have before. ErIC absolutely fascinating. Congratulations on the new race for your company. I hope you'll come back. That's eric Barnes, chief executive officer at vertigo Arrow.