Aerospace Xelerated: Meet Our Fourth Cohort

We are delighted to announce and welcome 11 innovative startups working on Digital Services and Solutions to the Aerospace Xelerated Family! These companies form, what is now, our fourth cohort and we are looking forward to working with them as they develop solutions to some of the key challenges facing the aerospace industry.

The AX program was designed to support the growth of startups regardless of where they are based and this cohort is testament to that. We received over 150 applications from around the world enabling us to select a very diverse cohort with companies from Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Netherlands, UAE, UK and USA. Amongst the founding teams, 80% are first-time founders, 1/3 have a female founder, and almost 1/2 include founders from an ethnic minority background. All of the cohort operate hybrid business practices of both remote and in-person activities and from a financing perspective 40% of the companies are at seed stage.

Following three successful programs led by Boeing and supported by a range of industry partners, we’re thrilled that this year’s program will be run in partnership with Tawazun Council, the defence and security acquisitions authority of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Our program partners also include the UK Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), GKN Aerospace and Etihad Airways. Without our partners this program wouldn’t be half as valuable to our cohort members!

Each of the 11 startups joining the cohort bring fresh perspectives and ideas across a range of Digital Services and Solutions. As our program theme, this has been split out into the following categories: Flight & Passenger Journey Optimization; Supply Chain Intelligence; Next Generation Workforce; and Operational Efficiency.

These are the startups in our new cohort:

• AEROSENS (Miami, USA): Aerosens focuses on technology, digitalisation and automation for aviation;
• Aiir Innovations (Amsterdam, Netherlands): Faster and smarter borescope inspections through artificial intelligence;
• AR Engineering (Sharjah, United Arab Emirates): AR Engineering is a software development company with the mission of changing the way we interact and learn with digital content;
• Basetwo (Toronto, Canada): Basetwo provides a low code platform that helps engineers design, build and operationalise digital twins of their manufacturing processes;
• Conductor Software (Brisbane, Australia): Conductor combines people and performance data giving leaders the insights they need to improve innovation, talent retention, customer experience and performance;
• Dessia Technologies (Paris, France): Dessia Technologies develops a software framework to accelerate decision-making and complex trade-offs with Artificial Intelligence in the engineering phases of industrial projects;
• KIT-AR (London, United Kingdom): With the KIT-AR platform, manufacturing companies digitally enhance their human workers to reduce the cost of poor quality by combining augmented reality with machine learning to provide step-wise context rich instructions with automated quality control;
• NABLA Mobility (Tokyo, Japan): Reducing fuel consumption and carbon by using ML/AI to enhance flight plans with comprehensive, multi-factor flight optimizations;
• People Tech Revolution (Brisbane, Australia): People Tech Revolution co-design and build immersive, human-centred VR training experiences;
• Quaisr (London, United Kingdom): Digital-connectivity infrastructure that scales simulation-backed AI workflows to mission-critical operational deployments, helping engineers to solve pressing problems in design, monitoring, optimisation and control;
• Zetamotion (London, United Kingdom): Zetamotion makes Quality Control faster and easier to deploy, use and scale by offering QC as a Service.

Benefits of the Program

Startups accepted into our program have the option to receive a £100K investment from Boeing, as well as the option to receive a £100K investment from Tawazun Council. Through Aerospace Xelerated, startups are introduced to a network of angel investors, venture capitalists and key stakeholders from across the aerospace industry, throughout the 12-week program. They also receive more than £100K in program perks from partners including startup providers Oracle, Amazon, HubSpot, Digital Ocean and many more.

Our partners will provide the cohort with industry insights and expertise. The selected companies will also have access to strategists and technical experts for support in developing proof of concept opportunities and they will receive mentoring from a global network of experienced entrepreneurs, business mentors, and investors.

Since Aerospace Xelerated launched in 2019, startups involved in our three previous cohorts have gone on to raise over £200M in additional funding and create over 150 jobs across the UK and globally. Our portfolio companies have gone on to work with large organisations such as PWC, Frazer-Nash, Chevron Technology Ventures and EasyJet.

We are incredibly excited to play even a small role in the development of this year’s cohort of companies as they work to provide solutions to some of the key challenges we face in aerospace!

The program will run for 12 weeks, culminating in a Demo Day in April 2023. Stay tuned for more developments over the course of our fourth cohort.

Sign up to the Aerospace Xelerated mailing list to hear the latest news from our network, follow us on Twitter or connect with us on LinkedIn.