Air mobility startup Bumble Bee Flights on Tuesday said it has raised $37 million (Rs 300 crore) from UK-based technology conglomerate SRAM & MRAM Technologies and Resources Ltd.
The Bangalore-based firm was founded earlier this year by serial entrepreneur Arjun Das, who previously co-founded the video analytics platform Nymo Technologies.
With the new funds, the firm aims to set up an assembly plant in Odisha for manufacturing air taxis. The company plans to launch the first prototype by April 2023, while the certified models will be available for production by 2024.
The electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft will be launched under the brand ‘Bee Flights,’ and will use replaceable batteries to hover, fly, take off, and land vertically. They can fly for 20 minutes for a distance of 20 km, it added.
“Electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft are the future of urban mobility and transport. These autonomous air taxis would not only ease the already burdened urban road infrastructure but will also work towards reducing carbon footprint,” Das said.
Air taxis would become a regular feature in the world by the year 2035 when about 10% of the transportation is expected to be managed and controlled by these flying vehicles, streamlining daily commuting, saving millions of driving hours, and reducing pollution drastically, the firm said in a statement.
Das said Bumble Bee Flights will design and manufacture its air taxis by partnering with operators across the globe to service, support and run the operations. The first step would be obtaining a certification to operate in the US, UK, UAE, India and Singapore.
He claimed that Bee is the first air taxi from India that will be certified in multiple countries and is intended for multiple uses — human transportation, air ambulance, air taxi and the logistics and supply chain sectors.
Morgan Stanley predicted that the global Urban Air Mobility market will grow 30% annually between 2021 and 2040, reaching $1.5 trillion by 2040.