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Xwing

Acquiredby Joby Aviation · June 2024

Converts cargo aircraft into fully autonomous airplanes

  • Aviation and Space
  • Hard Tech
  • Logistics
xwing.com ↗

About

Xwing built Superpilot, an autonomy system that turns existing aircraft into ones that fly gate to gate without a pilot on board, supervised from the ground. It retrofitted Cessna Caravan cargo planes and had been flying them autonomously since 2020, completing 250 fully autonomous flights and more than 500 automatic landings.

Xwing was the first company to receive an official FAA project designation for certifying a large unmanned aircraft, in April 2023, and the first to receive an Air Force Military Flight Release, in 2024. Marc Piette and Maxime Gariel founded it in San Francisco in 2016. It raised $54M, including a $40M Series B in 2021, and in June 2024 Joby Aviation acquired its autonomy division to support its air taxis and its US Department of Defense work.

Record

Stage
Series B
Category
Aviation and Space
Location
San Francisco, California
Team
51-100
Total raised
$54M

Founders

  • Marc Piette

    Founder & CEO

    Previously co-founded Locu, where he was COO, and was VP of data strategy at GoDaddy; earlier an engineering lead at Bloomberg and a security architect at IBM.

  • Maxime Gariel

    Co-Founder & CTO

    Previously a guidance, navigation and control engineer at Rockwell Collins, working on unmanned aircraft avionics, after a PhD at Georgia Tech and a postdoc at MIT; later Xwing's president, and now autonomy lead at Joby Aviation.

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