Meet our new cohort!

After receiving almost 150 applications from an eclectic crop of innovative companies based all around the world, we can reveal the 10 startups joining Aerospace Xelerated’s latest cohort.

These brilliant companies are utilising groundbreaking AI and autonomous technologies to solve incredibly complex problems for the aerospace industry.

Expert Insight

Over the next 12 weeks, cohort three will enjoy industry insights and expertise from programme partners Boeing, GKN Aerospace and the Ministry of Defence’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA).

Strategists and technical experts will be providing support in developing proof of concept opportunities, while a global network of seasoned entrepreneurs and investors is primed to provide mentoring and guidance.

The cohort will also benefit from an optional £100K equity investment from Boeing, introductions to a network of angels, venture capitalists and the wider aerospace industry, and more than £100K in programme perks from partners including startup providers Amazon, HubSpot, and SeedLegals as well as many others.

Ready for Success

As I revealed in my blog post last month, the programme can make a significant impact on the future of the participant startups. The two previous cohorts have gone on to raise more than £50M in additional funding and create more than 100 jobs across the UK.

The 10 companies joining this year — hailing from the UK, Europe, North America and Oceania — all cover Aerospace Xelerated’s key themes of autonomy, autonomous navigation, adaptive learning, generative design, smart maintenance and reduced workload.

What’s particularly exciting for me is that among this third cohort, 60% are first-time founders, 30% of the startups have a female founder, 20% have a minority ethnic founder, and almost 70% are seed-stage.

I can’t wait to see what the next 12 weeks will deliver with our Demo Day set for early April 2022. But in the meantime, let’s take a look at this year’s cohort and the problems they each address.

Meet the Cohort

Amygda (Derby, UK)
The disruption within aerospace due to unplanned maintenance can be very costly extending to either side of the equipment supply chain and eventually to the end passenger.

Based in London and founded by ex-Rolls-Royce and ex-Airbus engineers, Amygda is a data observability platform for smart maintenance in high-value asset industries to reduce unnecessary maintenance and increase the reliability and sustainability of assets.

Amygda’s processing system is built to handle big and complex data helping to minimise the impact of any disruption.

The Airline Pilot Club (Dublin, Ireland)
The pilot training industry can be an intimidating place with confusing information, conflicting advice, poor diversity and variable quality of both candidates and trainers.

The Airline Pilot Club, set up by Captain Andy O’Shea (former Head of Training at Ryanair), is a digital talent marketplace using AI and behavioural science to break down barriers to entry and improve quality standards in the pilot selection, training and recruitment process.

Axion (US)
Parts and components can be designed, reviewed and released, but then due to issues found in prototype and production, they may require redesign, leading to increased costs.

Axion is an AI-powered proactive management platform for engineering and quality leaders to accelerate development.

Its solution helps spot the early warning signals that a part is likely to have avoidable design iteration later on.

Flare Bright (Aylesbury, UK)
Drones typically have an unsophisticated approach to dealing with jamming, outages or failure. Flare Bright has developed the technology to develop a truly autonomous drone.

The machine-learning company enables drone manufacturers to build digital twins to rapidly speed up the long test and evaluation process, running many times faster than real-time to optimise for more confident real-world tests.

LexX Technologies (Melbourne, Australia)
Aircraft maintenance data is normally contained in multiple different systems, and searching this data, especially for technicians ‘on the job’ is especially difficult.

Australia’s LexX uses AI, machine learning and natural language processing to empower aircraft maintenance technicians to bring their data, knowledge, and experience together in one efficient and intelligent solution.

Neurobotx (US)
Traditional neural networks for robotics suffer from issues such as data overload, as they process the entire datasets they are fed.

Neurobotx is the first neuromorphic AI platform for autonomous navigation, capable of one-microsecond obstacle detection and decision-making based on big data, inspired by energy-efficient brain navigation.

Its algorithm is mitigating the video data overload in autonomy by offering microsecond-level detection of incoming objects, and event-based autonomous navigation based on far more energy efficient brain-inspired navigation.

Pegasus Imagery (Edmonton, Canada)
Data loses value over time for decision-makers; current collection is expensive and slow, and commercial and military users face the same barrier for safe integration of unmanned and manned aircraft in shared airspace during collection.

Pegasus Imagery develops autonomous aircraft and sensor systems to connect industry and government end-users with on-demand aerial imagery to solve challenges at scale. The Canadian firm’s founder Cole Rosentreter served in the Canadian Army for 15 years in its parachute infantry.

Sees.ai (Chichester & London, UK)
Unmanned aerial vehicles have the potential to transform how we live, work and travel but have been very difficult and expensive to scale.

Sees.ai is building the most advanced connected, autonomous command and control solution to enable safe and scalable unmanned flight in even the most challenging circumstances, such as industrial and urban environments.

Seidr (South Wales, UK)
In crises, leaders and teams will be disorientated by complexity and emotion as they face unexpected combinations of threats, risks and circumstance.

Seidr offers a virtual learning and testing environment for crisis situations. Using immersive technology to generate novel conditions in safe-to-fail environments, so that plans and learning can be validated within evolving situations.

TOffeeAM (London, UK)
Designs to make functional components and parts has historically been done by experience and limited by strong manufacturing constraints associated with drilling or milling etc. But the growing use of 3D printing to deliver designs is advancing smart industrial production.

TOffeeAM is a SaaS company providing an integrated cloud-based solution for advanced manufacturing. Its cloud-based software is capable of generating complex and efficient shapes that optimise a component’s performance in a completely automated procedure.

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