Munich-based Urban Air Mobility start-up D3 Technologies announces the completion of its Seed II funding round. Mobility players such as Vector Venture Capital GmbH as lead investor, SEK Ventures GmbH (founders of Flixbus), EIT KIC Urban Mobility, S.L (an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology) and Mutschler Ventures AG are participating in the round of a total of 2.9 million Euro.

The deep tech start-up D3 develops the first integrated traffic management system for urban aviation. The goal is to provide the control infrastructure that enables the use of urban airspace as an additional transport modality, as planned for in the coming years by cities and drone manufacturers. According to estimates, the market for air taxis (VTOLs) will develop rapidly. A recent Roland Berger study predicts that up to 160,000 commercial air taxis will be in use by 2050. The UAM passenger industry will then generate revenues of almost USD 90 billion per year.

The investment will enable the startup to build the first pilot application in 2021 in order to test its air traffic management solution. In 2022, D3 will equip first model regions with ground station, communication solution and on-board blue box (avionics).

D3 Technologies CEO Corvin Huber: „For urban air traffic to be able to carry passengers, a paradigm shift in air traffic management is needed. With D3, we are developing a rule-based method for handling man-carrying urban traffic, suggesting a system architecture that follows the required rules, and making a suggestion for means of compliance. In 2021, with the help of our partners, we will lay the foundation for air taxis to take off. “

Uwe Gerlinger, Managing Director of Vector Venture Capital GmbH: „We share the belief of the D3 aviation engineers: In 10 to 15 years, there will be so much traffic over urban areas that solutions as defined today will not be sufficient. We believe that a highly automated traffic management system is necessary to enable aircraft of the future to share a rather small and crowded airspace. We are investing in Skyroads because the start-up sees the bigger picture“.

CEO Corvin Huber, CCO Tim Krieglstein and their founding team of industry experts (Deutsche Flugsicherung, Eurocontrol, Airbus, Becker Avionics, BMW, Amazon, IBM, etc.) were able to attract investors such as Roby Stancel (Innovation), Thomas Riedel (Communication) and David Bourcier (Aerospace) for the first development phase.

The founders expect the first commercial use case involving the transportation of people in 2024.