- Led by Tom Plümmer, Co-founder and CEO, Wingcopter is a manufacturer of eVTOL, fixed-wing unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and provider of drone delivery services, focused on optimizing medical supply chains, as well as last-mile logistics of packages, tools, spare parts, food, and groceries.
Wingcopter, a Weiterstadt, Germany-based delivery drone manufacturer and service provider, raised $42m in Series A extension funding.
The round, tripling the company’s total equity raise to more than $60m to date, was supposed by REWE Group, Salvia and XAI technologies, which were joined by ITOCHU and previous backers Futury Capital and Xplorer Capital.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its drone delivery services globally, ramp up production, accelerate R&D efforts, and hire 80 new employees.
In mid-May, Wingcopter announced an extremely ambitious plan to deploy some 12,000 of its fixed-wing UAVs in Sub-Saharan Africa over the next half decade. As far as drone delivery markets go, it certainly makes sense, targeting users in remote areas that can often be hard to reach due to infrastructural issues.
Such a project will take a lot of resources, of course, but thankfully, the German startup just announced a $42 million funding round. The Series A extension brings Wingcopter’s raise above $60 million to date. It was led by German retail firm REWE Group and Salvia and XAI technologies.
REWE is the most interesting investor here. The company operates more than 12,000 grocery stores in Europe, and such a deal points to interesting uses for Wingcopter’s large 198 system to do more than the medical supply delivery it’s been thus far focused on, though specifics of such a deployment have yet to be announced. In addition to eyeing Africa and Europe, Wingcopter’s system was recently approved by the FAA, as it looks toward the U.S. for its rapidly expanding footprint.
