The ePlane Company raises $1 million to build a flying electric taxi, Auto News, ET Auto

Bengaluru: The ePlane Firm, a startup that’s attempting to construct flying electrical taxis to alleviate congestion in cities, has raised round $1 million in a seed funding spherical led by Speciale Make investments and Indian American entrepreneur-investor Naval Ravikant.

The spherical, which is predicted to assist the startup via its prototyping stage within the subsequent one yr, additionally noticed participation of Java Capital, FirstCheque.vc and Indian Institute of Administration, Ahmedabad’s CIIE incubator.

Incubated out of Indian Institute of Know-how, Madras, the corporate was based by Satya Chakravarthy, a professor of aerospace engineering on the institute, together with Pranjal Mehta, who graduated from IIT Madras in 2019.

Along with a staff of round 15 engineers, the duo has examined a small-scale unmanned prototype of its flying electrical taxi and is on observe to construct and fly a bigger mannequin with a 50 kg payload by mid-2021.

“We’re constructing flying taxis for door-to-door commuting in cities, and whereas there are a number of related efforts the world over, ours is a tech-centric strategy,” CEO Mehta stated. “We’ve developed IP right here in Chennai on the right way to make a taxi like this extraordinarily environment friendly and this has been confirmed in laptop simulations.”

The startup is working to design and construct a multi-rotor compact plane that may carry two occupants and have a variety of 200 km.

Furthermore, the plane is being designed for a number of brief hops and to ultimately land on rooftops and in entrance of a passenger’s doorstep.

Chakravarthy stated the automobile will utilise typical lithium-ion batteries, might be optimised to be quieter than a traditional helicopter and also will be far safer because of its multi-rotor design. The corporate has opted for a vertical take-off and touchdown (VTOL) design however may even use wings to provide aerodynamic raise throughout flight, making it extra environment friendly.

The idea is much like the British-built Harrier fighter plane however is dissimilar to quite a lot of international designs for flying taxis which both go for a brief runway or rely solely on rotors for flight.

“The taxi might be compliant with all of right this moment’s laws for aircrafts, so whereas we predict autonomous flight will turn out to be the norm for such automobiles sooner or later, right this moment’s laws don’t allow this. We’ll due to this fact have a human piloted model, so for now we’re specializing in that,” stated Chakravarthy.