INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Marc Piette had a revelation as he buzzed in and out of the Palo Alto Airport in pursuit of his pilot license
Instead of freedom, he saw restraint
He also saw potential.&It became pretty apparent that there were major issues with the general aviation industry with smaller aircraft,&
Piette said in a recent interview with TechCrunch
&And yet it had enormous potential to change the way people moved around.&Now, Piette two-year-old autonomous-aviation startup Xwing is
ramping up to unlock that potential
The company, which has kept a low profile since its founding, isn&t building autonomous helicopters and planes
Instead, it focused on the software stack that will enable pilotless flight of small passenger aircraft.The company announced Tuesday that
it has raised $4 million in a seed round led byEniac Ventures
Array Ventures, along with Stripe foundersJohn and Patrick Collison and Nat Friedman of Xamarin, Microsoft and GitHub, also participated in
the round.The funding will be used by the San Francisco-based company to scale operations and continue to hire aerospace and software
talent.The startup has about a dozen employees, including some uniquely talented folks who have experience withoptionally piloted vehicles,
unmanned systems and certified avionics
For example, the company CTO, Maxime Gariel, worked on autonomous-aviation projects such as DARPA Gremlins and the AgustaWestland SW4 Solo
Other members of the small team previously worked at Rockwill Collins, with the Naval Research Lab, Google, and McKinsey.Piette, whose last
company Locu was acquired by GoDaddy, sees several restraints to small passenger aircraft: the skill level required to fly a plane and the
cost of earning a pilot license and accessing a plane
The relatively puny sales volume of small aircraft — just3,293 general aviation aircraft, including helicopters, were delivered last year
worldwide, in contrast to more than 80 million cars — has depressed innovation and kept prices high.And even when people have both a
license and an aircraft, they still must travel from a small airport to their final destination.The company is focusing on the key functions
of autonomous flight, such as sensing, reasoning and control.Xwing isn&t pinned to one kind of aircraft
Piette said the system is designed to work across different kinds of aircraft
For instance, the company spent 18 months testing on a subscale fixed-wing aircraft
It tested on a helicopter more recently.Xwing is developing and integrating those technologies for rotorcraft, general aviation
fixed-wingand the emerging electric vertical takeoff and landing (known as eVTOL) aircraft.The company sensor integration software enables
aircraft to perceive the world around it andreliably detect ground-based and airborne hazards and precisely determine the vehicle
position.Thisperception technology is the building block for autonomous aircraft, and also can be used to increase the operational envelope
of current-day piloted aircraft, according to Xwing.From here, the company Autonomy Flight Management System (AFMS) allows the aircraft to
act upon the information from its surroundings
The system will integrate with air traffic control, generate flight paths to navigate the airspace, monitor system health and address all
contingencies to ensure passenger safety, the company says.Now, Xwing is in discussion with various, and still unnamed, large companies
about integrating the system into their aircraft.
