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Flying into the future | Prof. Satya Chakravarthy @ The ePlane Company
162 Plays4 years ago
The end of the 2000s saw the rise in radio taxi services. In the next decade, the urban mobility market in India was captured by Ola and Uber. You might wonder what’s in store for commuters in this decade!
In a candid conversation with Akshay Datt, Prof. Satya Chakravarthy, Co-founder, and CTO, The ePlane Co, takes us through his amazing journey. A veteran in the Indian aerospace arena, he is heading NCCRD, which is one of the world’s largest combustion research centers and is a member of the advisory board of various start-ups incubated at IIT Madras.
Prof. Satya, along with Pranjal Mehta started The ePlane Co in 2016 and took the aerial route in a bid to solve the ever-growing issues with road infrastructure in urban cities. And that’s not all! This air taxi company is ready to test its product in a year or two.
Tune in to this episode to hear Prof. Satya speak about how The ePlane Co is planning to disrupt the urban mobility industry with its cutting-edge and cost-effective technology.
What you must not miss!
- Experience of running NCCRD.
- Future of electric airplanes.
- The technology behind air taxis.
- Fundraising journey.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Founder Thesis Podcast & Satya Chakrabarti
00:00:00
Speaker
Let's take a look at the video. Hello. I'm Akshay. Hi, I'm Akshay. Hi, this is Aurob. And you are listening to the Founder Thesis Podcast. We meet some of the most celebrated sort of founders in the country. And we want to learn how to build a unicorn. I am Satya Chakrabarti, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at IIT Madras.
00:00:30
Speaker
and co-founder, CTO of the E-Plane Company. While most of the world knows India for its software talent and Bangalore as its Silicon Valley, it won't be long before the world starts to acknowledge India for its innovations in engineering. And as expected, leading the back are engineers from IITs.
Satya's Academic and Professional Journey
00:00:50
Speaker
One such engineer who has made an outsized contribution to the field of engineering in India is Professor Satya Chakravarti, an aerospace engineer who returned from the US to become a part of the faculty at IIT Madras. But Professor Satya was no ordinary faculty. Empowered with intellectual clarity, along with a desire to push the boundaries, he set up one of the world's largest combustion research centers at IIT Madras.
00:01:17
Speaker
and then took the learnings of this center to help pass startups in domains ranging from space travel to satellites to turbines. But the pivotal moment that will drive him for the next 10 years actually came about when he decided to ditch combustion technology for electric vehicles and lead him to start the E-plane Co, an air taxi company that is potentially going to rewrite how we travel in a couple of years.
00:01:44
Speaker
He has Professor Satya telling Akshay Dutt about the journey of getting into aerospace. So, I mean, I'm basically a typical Indian middle-class kid at the time, right? So you go through the JEE, which is the IIT entrance exam, and so you get a rank, which essentially means that you're shown a place.
00:02:08
Speaker
within which you can actually choose a bunch of things. So I could have essentially with that, with what I got, I could have actually become a chemical engineer. But then I felt that aerospace was a little bit more attractive than chemical. And there was a good chance that I would actually get aerospace engineering in Chennai where my parents were. So these were essentially less attractive considerations.
00:02:34
Speaker
But the more interesting thing was that once you actually join IIT, and this happens even today, a lot of your seniors actually tell you that the branch that you've got is pretty lousy. You need to be working hard to actually get a branch change. And you should be aiming for getting up to these so-called upper, higher branches like computer science or whatever it is. And so everybody starts doing this.
00:02:57
Speaker
I didn't really work hard, but I was one of the studious guys. So I actually got a second position. And two people were allowed to take a branch change from aerospace. And I got an opportunity to do mechanical. And that's when I realized, if I actually go to mechanical, I would be the 26th in the class. Whereas if the first of those guys actually takes a branch change, then I become the top of the aerospace. So
Choosing Academia Over Industry
00:03:20
Speaker
I just stayed back in aerospace. All right.
00:03:24
Speaker
And when is this like when you joined IIT? How long back? Oh, this was long back. This was 1987 is when I got into IIT and graduated with my bachelor's in aerospace in 1991. And this must have made your parents super proud. Were they like from a similar like a service class background or like? Well, no, I mean, they were they had much modest backgrounds. They are not I think my father had just gone to college to just do his
00:03:52
Speaker
high school back in those years, they had something called a pre-university course. So none of them actually had college degrees. So neither of them. So they had no idea what they were, what their son was up to. Wow. So you were pretty motivated right from childhood. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I can say that. OK. So once you passed out from IIT Madras with a degree in aerospace engineering, then what next?
00:04:21
Speaker
like immediate job opportunities or like, you know, what was the scene like at that time? Right. So, you know, when you join IIT and this happens even today, of course, things are slightly different when compared to then. Everybody actually asks for what kind of job are you going to get. And so that's a concern that people have. But when you go through an IIT degree program, you pretty much stop boggling about a job because you know that you can do bigger things than just a job.
00:04:51
Speaker
So that exactly what happened to me by about the third year or so I decided that I'm not going to go for a job, I'll just go for higher studies. So I did not even sit for the placements. And I think there was like only one job interview that I just walked into and the expert that was there hired by the company to interview people actually talked me away from taking up the job because I was so good. These are really crazy things.
00:05:21
Speaker
So he said, why are you wasting your time on this job? And the company had actually hired him to pick me up. And then this guy was actually talking me out of it. But anyway, I did go to Georgia Tech after that for my master's and PhD. Yeah. How did you find that coming from a very modest background? Back in those days, nobody funds their education. You have to actually get a financial aid. Otherwise, you don't go. That's it.
00:05:48
Speaker
I mean, there were a very small, very small exception of people who are trying to find themselves. But I think the norm from IITs back then was you have to get a financial aid. So I was getting a research assistant. And how was that experience living in a foreign country that to a country which would have been like 20 years ahead of India at that time? Yeah, fairly well ahead when compared to so because I think the disparity today is much smaller when compared to what it used to be.
00:06:16
Speaker
right and things like very simple things like telephones or right or or back in those days we had these cassette players for audio all these things were like so commonplace over there whereas you know back in India you won't have a telephone for example right so it was like a luxury to have a phone yeah something like that so
Passion for Teaching and Research at IIT Madras
00:06:40
Speaker
but but
00:06:42
Speaker
And the other thing is, so because you don't have telephones and stuff, communication, we used to write letters every 15 days or every week and stuff back home. And I have to actually have a slot for talking to my mom once in 15 days for about 10 minutes exactly at a particular time in my neighbor's phone at home here back here. So those were the most painful things, but otherwise, yeah, I mean, America is actually a very interesting place, right? So you suddenly,
00:07:12
Speaker
he sends a lot of freedom and you start getting money in your hands. So those are the things. I think what people are going through in India as like fresh out of college people who are getting good jobs here in India, the same kind of thing he used to feel over there. So didn't you want to stay back? It must have been so much better than India being there.
00:07:41
Speaker
in terms of opportunities. That's true. So I mean, a lot of people, of course, have stayed back. And I think by the time I came back to India, returned back for good, it was a trickle back. Today, you can see a lot more people coming back after different years of stints in the US, working on jobs and all that stuff, and then picking up different positions here and so on.
00:08:09
Speaker
Back in those days, nobody would come here. In fact, the problem essentially was the traffic the other way was actually picking up because until up then, when I was going, it was primarily a preserve of typically like IITians to go abroad, go to the US for higher studies, and then they would settle there in jobs and companies and stuff. But when I was coming back, like in about 97, is when a lot of software jobs were getting opened up.
00:08:40
Speaker
So you needn't be an IIT anymore to be able to go to the US. And particularly, there was something called this Y2K problem, where they had to go through lines and lines of COBOL programs to change the date from two digits to four digits for the year. And there were people going in droves for it. And then, of course, there was this what's called a dot-com boom that happened.
00:09:06
Speaker
just about prior to the times when Bangalore became like the Indian Silicon Valley. So the norm was actually to send people over there. And then so there is something called this body shopping that happened. And so everybody was actually going to the US when I was actually swimming upstream. Against the tide, right. Yeah, so I did look like an idiot at the time.
00:09:35
Speaker
But it was for family reasons that you wanted to come back? Oh, no. So the thing is, I'm slightly different. So when I was doing my BTEC here, it's very small bunch of people. We were only 14 of us actually going through aerospace engineering at IIT Madras at the time. After all those plant change exits had happened. And
Entrepreneurship and the Birth of Startups
00:10:00
Speaker
The 14 of us are actually extremely naughty. We really were passionate about what we were learning in the classroom and we used to come back to the hostel and then try to implement it and all of that stuff. So we were always passionate about what we were learning in aerospace. We are very excited. And it turned out that a very good bunch of us were very serious about actually coming back to teach at the same place because we found it was actually a very cool thing to do. IIT profs were very brainy. They were teaching us very well.
00:10:28
Speaker
And so on. So we get to teach any kids. So it looked like a cool job, right? Except that, you know, I was one of those guys who was kind of hooked on to it continuously. I mean, didn't really bother to change my opinion about it, but other people moved on. Right. So so when it came, when the time came and every time I used to come back on a vacation, I used to visit my department and
00:10:51
Speaker
I think my former professors had like a lot of conviction that I would come back and they were encouraging me to do that and so on. So it's sort of like a default option. And yeah, that's what it was. And I didn't really have much of an opportunity to change that. I didn't really bother to do that. And the other thing is like I actually went into doing rocket propulsion.
00:11:15
Speaker
and in Georgia Tech and I think in rocket, so there are a lot of these computational or let's say computer geeky stuff where you'll find a lot of Indians work on it but when it comes to things like rockets and so on it's it's like a very very exclusive national preserve so I mean that's true even today right so you won't find like too many Indians in SpaceX for example even for a private company.
00:11:42
Speaker
Right. And it's largely the white American male, you know, preserve even today. Right. And that's that's how it is. We can set the demographics works like that. So so I didn't really have much for distraction that way from the default option that I had.
00:12:00
Speaker
That was the main reason. But usually what people do is they don't care about all these things. They kind of like first they're saying, I have to come. I have to sit here and find out my opportunities. Because back home, the opportunities are not too much anyway. So people actually squat. I mean, they're not like, they're not really wanted either. But it's sort of a balance that you have to strike.
00:12:23
Speaker
Okay. So, like, you know, your, your IIT state was, like, largely restricted to academics? Or were you also doing like R&D and filing patents? And, you know, what was that experience like? Oh, yeah. So, yeah, a typical IIT professor actually has a bunch of things to do. Okay. And depends on how painful those pursuits are. So,
00:12:51
Speaker
So we get to teach, first of all. And we get to do a lot of research. We get to do a lot of work for the industry. And then we also get to develop products, technology products, and so on. And there are a few people who also get into administrative work and so on. So what I got to do was to, of course, teaching was mandatory, basic.
Exploring Electric Aviation
00:13:21
Speaker
So I used to do teaching, and then I used to do a lot of research, and I have actually been working a lot with the industry in doing industry research. That's what I have primarily done in the last, let's say, since the time I started, for the next 20 years, from 1997 till about 1970. And in the last three, four, five years is when I have actually got into an entrepreneurial journey. And that's kind of like a new stint in my case.
00:13:51
Speaker
Okay. So, you know, what made you like, you know, jump ship to become an entrepreneur from an academician? Like, what was the trigger for that? Sure. So one of the things that I did in the later part of my proper academic career was to work on setting up the world's largest combustion research center in academia.
00:14:17
Speaker
So we got a pretty good grant of about some $11 million worth of money, about 10 years back. And with that, for the next five years, through 2012 to 2016, I was engaged in trying to get to set up this huge combustion center, right? And it's not as if somebody just dropped the money on my lap. Prior to that, for a few years, we had to actually work hard to
00:14:44
Speaker
make the proposal and revise it and go through a lot of committees, reviews and all of the stuff to get it, get to where we got. And then we got the money and then we have to spend it. And who gave this money? It was the government, the Department of Science and Technology that did that. So what is a combustion center like you research about combustion technology? What does that mean? So combustion is all about anything that burns.
00:15:13
Speaker
So our goal was to do combustion research on automotive engines, like their cars and trucks and buses, whatever that is. And similarly, combustion in rockets and planes, that's what's called aerospace propulsion. Then we have combustion happening in thermal power plants, like coal or biomass kind of combustion. And lastly, we were also actually interested in fire suppression.
00:15:43
Speaker
So that's where you actually try to put out combustion. It's an unwanted combustion.
Challenges of Deep Tech Startups in India
00:15:50
Speaker
So we have a large number of faculty colleagues across different departments who we gather together to work on these multiple different areas of combustion. And this was, as I was coming to say, this was kind of like the $11 million that we were actually getting was more like a seed, seed money, right? So with this seed, we actually set up a lot of equipment and gathered a lot of people
00:16:13
Speaker
researchers, PhD students, and so on, and take a lot of industry problems. So that money actually grew. And IIT put in about something like, I think, 12, 13 clothes or so for building this massive building that we have got. And so I spent a lot of effort trying to get to the antiquities of building that building, housing all the fancy equipment, doing the state-of-the-art research, and so on.
00:16:41
Speaker
attracted a lot of industry participation. So you've done like about 40, 50 projects with all kinds of combustion related industry and mopped up another about 300, 400 crores of rupees. So that 11 million actually grew to something like about 54 million. So in the next six, seven years. So we have been actually one of the most active, busiest, largest combustion research centers in the world in an academic setting.
00:17:11
Speaker
Okay. And what kind of companies were you helping out? Like, you know, what was your contribution to industry? Right. So, uh, in the aerospace domain, for example, uh, GVG aviation has been a very ardent, uh, user and supporter and, uh, uh, collaborator. Uh, for example, that should give an example, but otherwise you have DRDO, ISRO, BHEL, uh, lots of the Indian R and D institutions as well as public sector and lots of smaller companies.
00:17:41
Speaker
that have furnaces, boilers, and so on. So huge number of companies that have been working. So I think I've not got to put the point of answering you about the entrepreneurship. So while we're doing all these things, we were also mandated to actually work on some grand challenges in combustion of practical importance. And we did that. And we worked on those and
00:18:06
Speaker
We got fantastic results and we developed some new combustor concepts and technologies and so on. And that's when I realized that if I have to actually push these things out to the industry or get it to see the light of day,
E-Plane's Vision for Urban Aerial Mobility
00:18:20
Speaker
I am actually now working with very large companies like let's say take GE for example.
00:18:26
Speaker
right and or a thermal power plant industry right so they are like really really massive and they have installations that are worth like several billion dollars right so and it's not easy to actually push technology into such a big industry because they have figured out what technology
00:18:44
Speaker
works for them, and they think that they know the perspective for the next decade to do, and they have sunk in that kind of money for the next decade. So it's a very slow-paced industry in that sense, right, in terms of, like, and the technology there evolves. It's more like the development, the evolution rather than by innovation or by disruption or any of those things.
00:19:07
Speaker
So it's hard to push new tech in these areas. So that's when we chanced upon the approach that we could essentially push these new technologies through startups. And now, we could have taken two parts. One is, can we just an academic, I can develop these new technologies, get the data, and then go to conferences around the world and present them.
00:19:38
Speaker
become like a very big shot professor, which I was anyway already, but can be a bigger shot professor. And so on, and just be there. And then, essentially, the technology sleeps in the lab, or it gets picked up 10 years later by somebody else, and so on. And we don't care. The other thing is, no, no, no, we have actually done something big. So let me actually try to push this into the real world. And that means I have to actually develop a product around the technology.
00:20:08
Speaker
So, and that's a different ballgame, because it's one thing to do science, another thing to develop a technology around it, and yet another thing to actually put the technology into your product, because there is only one particular aspect of the product that is actually using this technology, but there are lots of other bells and whistles that you need to have around that technology for the product to function as a whole, right?
00:20:33
Speaker
And yet the problem is, well, okay, fine, we can actually think about a product, then who is going to buy it, right? So then what is the market, right? So I had to then suddenly phase all these problems, as in it's one thing to have the technology, then what about the product, what about the market, right? So, and soon I was suddenly beset with these questions of entrepreneurship, right? And I have to understand all these
00:20:59
Speaker
Things like what is a lean startup model? What is like a business model canvas? What are their product market fit? What is customer validation, customer identification, customer discovery? All kinds of things was actually being thrown at me thick and fast and I had to actually absorb all of that stuff. It became a new challenge to solve basically. But I really wanted to meet up the challenge because unless we bridge that cause chasm,
00:21:29
Speaker
we are not going to put any technology from the lab out into the market. You need to go through this. You have to bridge this. And essentially, you have to walk out of your comfort zone. So just trying to do this with
00:21:46
Speaker
Couple of technologies that were happening in the lab. One was a new combustor concept, which is like an extremely low emissions combustor. And with which we had a startup called Aerostribulos, which is making a micro gas turbine, which today we are now thinking about putting on onboard trucks for like onboard charging of a this thing, what do you call a battery pack, which will make it like a hybrid electric vehicle. All right.
00:22:16
Speaker
But the other thing that we started doing was 3D printed combustors, or 3D printed engines. And this was now getting translated into 3D printed rockets, which could now be moderately strung together to make a launch vehicle that will put microsatellites in space. So that's the other startup called Agnicool that came out of this.
00:22:43
Speaker
But then while these and then there are a couple of other start-ups. These are all start-ups that got incubated in IIT Madras. So there is still another start-up that's based out of the research that we have done in the combustion center that is converting un-segregated municipal solid waste into crude oil. So and that's still picking up in terms of traction and so on because
00:23:06
Speaker
If you just notice around, there is really, really tons and tons of garbage that we are generating. And for us to be able to scale up to that level from being a startup is not so easy. So that's another thing that's going on. So these are all essentially the combustion research-based startups that have come out of our center. So what was your level of involvement in these? Were you like a technical advisor or were you like a
00:23:36
Speaker
part of the core team that was launching it and commercializing it. Yeah, that's a fantastic question because that is what is actually going to lead to a completely different story about the electric plane, right, which I am doing the plane. So to answer your question quickly, in all these things, I'm essentially kind of like a co-founder, one of those co-founders, essentially ideating and then incorporating and incubating that the IRE Madras incubation cell
00:24:06
Speaker
And from then on, it's essentially like looking out for having the other co-founders to run the game, and I would essentially be like a strategy advisor as well as the technical advisor. But I have this, what do you call, notion that we should be looking out for the market, we should be looking at the customer, all of those things. And then configure the product for the customer or the market, and then see how the technology fits in instead of the other way around.
00:24:36
Speaker
So those are things that I've been able to embrace and sort of insist on with the group saying that we should actually be more customer-focused. So it's more like more advisory, but fundamentally at the co-founder level. So that's what I have been doing. And that was OK. So long as I was actually doing co-founder advisory role, that was OK for me to continue to
Future Plans and Global Expansion
00:25:00
Speaker
teach.
00:25:02
Speaker
What I did not tell you that happened alongside my just about completing to set up the combustion center was my At the time it looked like a distraction to electric Okay, and electric is not using combustion right like if I can't that's correct. So You got it right. So this is sort of like the irony of life so to speak right? So I'm here I am I
00:25:27
Speaker
at the zenith of my career, setting up like this largest combustion center doing all these things and breaking in so much research funds and all of that. And here I am actually getting distracted by electric. Okay. So, and this actually happens specifically one day. And this was the first of October 2016. It's a Saturday and approximately 6 p.m. In fact, it's actually 6 p.m.
00:25:54
Speaker
So I got a mail from one of my combustion center former colleagues from our alumni circuit, which circulated a video, a 53-minute video by this person called Professor Tony Seba, who is a Stanford thought leader. And subsequent to that point, he has actually written his book on sustainability and so on.
00:26:20
Speaker
But this particular talk was very instructive in saying that in the next 13 to 14 years, that is through 2030, we will see this transition to electric vehicles completely. And all of that power is actually going to come from solar. And watching this glued to all the data that he was showing to assert why this kind of transformation is actually going to happen.
00:26:49
Speaker
was like, at the end of it, I'm like, what the heck am I doing in my life? Because I'm setting up this combustion center, and we have these three main pillars of automotive combustion, thermal power, and aerospace propulsion. And two out of these three pillars were actually getting knocked off 30.
00:27:07
Speaker
And I've seen people in conferences actually kind of speaking out and living in denial saying that, you know, fire is the first discovery of man and it will always be there and combustion is not going to die and all those things. And you feel like saying, hey, why are you saying all these things? Because you actually are afraid that it's going to go away.
00:27:28
Speaker
So that day I had the choice. So I could actually now cling on to that one pillar on which the whole thing would rest, which is aerospace propulsion. That's where I belong, starting from my training, from my undergrad. And I could say, aerospace propulsion is the last version of combustion. It's going to be so difficult for electric to come up and
00:27:51
Speaker
disrupt that because planes and rockets require a lot more power that fuel will offer and electric cannot and all that stuff. Or I can ask the question, hey, maybe it can and we have to figure it out. So this is where whatever they say, be the change that you want to see or whatever. So I then said, instead of living in denial, let's embrace the change.
00:28:17
Speaker
And I admire your intellectual honesty in terms of being able to not get emotional because you are so invested into combustion. So that's the point, right? So you should actually have this kind of an external agent kind of feel about what you're doing all the time. So you're doing everything very busy in your life.
00:28:44
Speaker
But you're also actually looking from somewhere at the top of your head to see what the heck is going on in your life. And then you should be able to say, well, if you have to let go of something, just let go of it and then move on. And that was that moment. And that's when I then decided, let me actually look at what's happening in the electric aviation space. And lo and behold, I actually found a lot of things that are already happening.
00:29:14
Speaker
It's just a matter of actually opening your eyes and looking around. So I found that there were quite a few companies that were doing this. Because we've always grown up hearing about these things called ad taxis. And as an aerospace engineer, we were always like, hey, that's not happening anymore, anytime soon. That's a kind of immediate refrain that you would always come across. But here they were ad taxi companies that were happening.
00:29:41
Speaker
And I also found that there was a lot of research that was done by NASA and so on. So I started looking at all of that stuff and started reading up on all of those papers that were coming my way and digging up the literature further and further and stuff. And one of the things a good professor does is if he wants to learn a course, learn a topic, he actually teaches a course on it. And that's exactly what I do. That's a great approach.
00:30:10
Speaker
So I actually offered a course which is, I think, still the first and only full-fledged semester-long course on electric aircraft propulsion. And I picked up a bunch of different conference papers and strung them together to form a syllabus for the course in a very coherent manner, developing the subject so that I can teach it. And I actually taught it back to back. Usually, we don't really teach the same course back to back.
00:30:37
Speaker
because we rotate among a bunch of courses across the semesters. But in 2019, I actually got an opportunity to teach this for the first time after putting the course contents for the Senate and stuff. And then the second time, I actually wanted to get a video record. So I then got the whole thing video recorded, except that around the same time, I then started this company called the Eplane Company.
00:31:03
Speaker
And I got so busy with it that I haven't actually had time to edit this video content to put it out on YouTube. So it's kind of like hidden somewhere. But it's possible that, you know, since then I've actually learned a lot more. So I may want to actually do the course again. And so on. So because the learning never stops. You just keep learning more and more. And then you can refine it into like something more basic versus something
00:31:30
Speaker
more advanced and then so on. So we may be able to grade that approach and then put it out academically later on. But the passion for actually going out and building a plane and flying it that we took over the passion for developing all this course material for people and stuff. So from 2020 onwards, I actually went on a sabbatical.
00:31:55
Speaker
to get into building the electric plane. And that's where I'm like a full time co-founder now. If you like to hear stories of founders, then we have tons of great stories from entrepreneurs who have built billion dollar businesses. Just search for the founder thesis podcast on any audio streaming app like Spotify, Ghana, Apple Podcasts and subscribe to the show.
00:32:27
Speaker
So how did you get the company off the ground? Like, you know, something like this needs a lot of upfront investment. You know, it's not like a service business where you start seeing money coming in relatively fast. So how did you get it off the ground? And like, you know, who are there with you in this? Like, if you could talk to me about that journey from zero to one. Yeah.
00:32:53
Speaker
Well, we are not yet zero to one. We are like zero to half at the moment. But we're getting there. We are getting to zero to one soon. I mean, we are going in the direction. But I think there are two questions hidden in the question that you asked. One is something specific to the electric planes part that I'm doing, and another one that is actually larger on the deep tech entrepreneurship.
00:33:17
Speaker
Right. So I think the larger question is actually more important and easier to answer in that sense, which is how do you do deep tech entrepreneurship? All right. Because everything that we talk about, the 3D printed modular rockets, which we do in Agnico, or the fancy new combustion technology that we have put into the micro gas turbine start-up era of struggle laws, or the garbage to crude oil company X2 fuels.
00:33:46
Speaker
And then so on. All of these things are actually deep tech. And then, of course, we now have the last few months, we have a fifth startup called Galaxi, which is a remote sensing Earth observation satellite startup where we have to actually put together satellites and launch them into space. So all of these things are actually literally hardware deep tech startups. And to get them off the ground and go to market with it is actually not a joke at all. It takes about three, four years for you to get there.
00:34:16
Speaker
Right. So that's when you need to actually have solid investors who are putting in what's called a patient capital that you have to identify. And that's actually the hardest part today, particularly in India. And fortunately for us, I think in at least about three out of these four or five companies that I mentioned, we had found Speciale Invest, which put in the early seed money, which is of the order of, let's say,
00:34:45
Speaker
Under half a million, right? So some are between two to three crores 3.3 and a half crores that kind of number so So this specially has actually been good in trying to put that so They have the one they're the ones who actually took the risk in that sense, right? But if you really think about it, I
00:35:04
Speaker
There are two parts to what follows, and that's most astounding. The immediate thing for us to think is, hey, wait a minute. There's not just a half a million play. This is actually going to be like tens of millions of dollars that's required for you in the next three, four years. Who's going to? That's when you have to actually show milestones and pieces of technology development progressively to who the next round of investors and the next round of investors and so on.
00:35:30
Speaker
So this game is one of those things where you will need, I mean, we have had to actually invent new names for the rounds. Like, so do we want to call this pre-seed, seed, host seed, pre-series, seed, no. Because we are not going to market at all. We are raising so many rounds, right? So we don't fit into this, you know, the template of seed series A, series B, right? I don't even know what they are. All I need is, all I know is I need money.
00:36:00
Speaker
when you call it whatever you want. Who is giving me money? How much dilution can I afford? And that's the biggest, what do you call, balance that I have to strike. I should be able to show progress. I'm always going towards my goal post as I had planned. And I have to show the credibility that this is actually going to work. And it will make a big impact. It is actually serving a big market. All of that stuff.
00:36:27
Speaker
So the interesting thing about this is, when you know, say, tens of millions of dollars, it looks like a large sum. But in reality, our foreign counterparts actually are raising hundreds of millions of dollars. And that really scares a lot of people, saying, hey, this is actually like a billion dollar game. What are you talking about?
00:36:52
Speaker
And that's when what we have actually discovered in the last two to three years going through these things is the India play here is actually not only about low cost, but also actually an innovation that is over and above or on top of what the rest of the world does. So previously, when you now look at software and stuff, it used to be simply like a cheap labor. But here we are not talking about it at all because we are developing tech
00:37:22
Speaker
Right. And like hardware, deep tech, we have to actually show the investors a technical differentiator that is going to help us grab the market against international competition. OK. And that's not a joke. We are not trying to copy anybody else. We are not trying to say we will copy somebody else at one tenth the cost. No, no, no, no, no. Nobody buys a document. You have to say that we are actually doing something bigger and better than what other people are doing. And by the way, it also actually cost you only one tenth.
00:37:52
Speaker
And that's a particular aspect that you will see when we actually hit the zero to one. There will be three things that will actually stand out in everything that we are doing. One is, first of all, we are actually doing tech that is cut about the rest. And that's what investors want. Otherwise, they will not even touch us. The second, we are actually doing it out of India.
00:38:17
Speaker
And the reason why I'm specifically saying that is not because Indians can't do it. There is this general notion that Indians may not be able to do it. And that's something that we want to actually break the mold on. And the third, the lowest cost at which we can do this. So these three aspects are actually going to make it a lot more astounding story than just the product that we are putting out in the model.
00:38:42
Speaker
So if you were anywhere else, it would be just the product. But here, it's actually a three-fold impact. And that's the point I want to make. It is hard to raise funds, and it is a long-term thing. But when compared to the rest of the world, it is actually not as bad. And that's something that I want everybody to understand. And we are seeing this happen. I want to understand.
00:39:11
Speaker
First, what is the big picture vision that you are selling to the investor? What is it that ePlane will do? And second is what are the milestones to reach this? So the big picture vision, again, if I have to actually say what the big picture vision in a podcast like this,
00:39:31
Speaker
That would be very different when compared to the big picture vision that I actually tell my investor to sell them. Because the big picture vision that I have in my mind that I can actually share in a podcast is I just want everybody to fly. So that means you step out of your home, you want to actually go to your office or a restaurant, you fly out of your terrace.
00:39:57
Speaker
So that's what we want. And if you want to actually get out of your city and go by to the nearby city, where you don't really have an airport as of today, you still fly. So no matter where you want to go, you fly. This is actually the big picture version. Now, obviously, if I actually go and tell this to an investor, he's actually going to say, hey, the coffee was good. Thank you. So we have to kind of say what we have to say in doses.
00:40:23
Speaker
And that's because we have to actually specifically look at and show a market. Otherwise, there is really no point. It's all good to have vision and all those things. But everybody, I mean, people will actually wait patiently for the 10th slide and say, hey, where is the market? OK, so let's be grounded. Entrepreneurship is all about going to market. There is nothing less than that.
00:40:48
Speaker
The vision that we show to the investor as far as e-plane is concerned is urban aerial mobility. So the idea here is very simple. We are actually doing electric planes because it's not like about the environment and pollution and greenhouse gases, global warming. All of that stuff is there, right? But the electric planes are actually going to disrupt aviation. So the way electric cars grew is
00:41:18
Speaker
The electric car makers always had the burden that they had to compete with the existing IC engine cars for showing a decent range in a single charge. Otherwise, there is always what's called as a range anxiety. People don't want their cars to stop in the middle because they ran out of battery. It's probably okay to run out of battery on your mobile phone, but not on your car in the middle of the road.
00:41:45
Speaker
They always had to wait until that point. And what that decision made meant was with the available batteries, no matter how slowly the progress is on making these batteries better and better, they would they can and they would actually try to pack a lot of battery on the floor of the car chassis. Right. And in order to get the kind of range that people will get comfortable with driving. All right. And this made the cars heavier, but it didn't matter.
00:42:09
Speaker
They would actually put it right at the bottom and they would make it very stable and then sell a new car. That's completely different from the car. But it competes with rage. But battery is actually the biggest, most expensive part of the car. The battery prices are falling, all right, but they're not falling below the point where the IC engine cars, the electric cars are cheaper than the IC engine car. They're coming from above, which is
00:42:38
Speaker
They are getting electric cars to be priced above the combustion cars, get only some elite people to buy and then come down progressively. Here, if you try to pack a lot of battery into an electric plane just to get kind of the range that you want, you will not even take off because your plane will become too heavy.
00:43:00
Speaker
So you can't pack only so much battery because that's what, it's not even technology, it's just basic science. I mean, you will not be able to actually satisfy Newton's laws, right? So in which case, battery being the most expensive part of the whole thing, and there is nothing else. If you now look at electric planes, battery, motor, propeller, that's it. You don't really have engine fuel tanks, fuel pumps, plumbing lines and all of that.
00:43:25
Speaker
you know, complication. So this is actually a very, very simple machine. And you can pack only so much battery. So all of a sudden, you have the situation where electric planes right up front can be cheaper than their combustion counterparts as they are made right away, which is very different from the way the electric cars came down into the market. All right.
00:43:50
Speaker
So now the question is, fine, I actually have a cheaper plane, which means that I can disrupt aviation. I can have, like, what do you call lower ticket prices for people to fly. But they aren't going too far because I have only a small amount of battery. So the distance actually becomes very, very small. So what do you do with a plane that cannot go too far? So there are two things that we can do. One, and that's why I'm actually talking about the market. So that's why I'm bringing the market. So one thing is you can
00:44:19
Speaker
You can go to a neighboring city or like a suburb or any of those places. So let's say from where I am in my city, I can actually go to the suburb or the next town. And that would be about 200 kilometers at the most. That's the kind of distance we can think of. But the problem with that is there are really no two cities that are just about 200 kilometers apart, both of them having an airport.
00:44:47
Speaker
Okay. So why do they take off out of your land? Right. So in fact, many times, for example, if you are in Bangalore, right, if you want to actually take a plane, you have to go to an airport that's actually about 80 kilometers away. Right. You would want to ask the question, shouldn't that be flying flying to that place? Isn't it? Right. So that's where the other, uh, uh, what do you call use case or the application market is the urban aerial mobility. All right.
00:45:12
Speaker
So urban aerial mobility immediately presents you the opportunity that you can actually go from place A to place B within the city, as an intra-city commute, within about 10 kilometer, 20 kilometer, 30 kilometer kind of distances, by flying from one place to the other. And why would I want to do that? Because I just get stuck in traffic otherwise. So what usually takes you about one or one and a half hours to touch through traffic can be done in about five, 10 minutes.
00:45:39
Speaker
And that's a huge savings. And the question then is, can I actually do it at approximately the same cost or a little bit more for the time and convenience that I'm getting? Yeah, the answer is yes. And that's what electric planes can do for you. So this would essentially be a replacement to a helicopter, like the way a helicopter is used for. Exactly. That's the next point I was trying to make. So why hasn't this been happening so far is because so far we have actually been putting up with a helicopter.
00:46:09
Speaker
And the helicopter is actually a very, very expensive machine to own, operate, and maintain. And that's exactly where we are disrupting. And the electric planes are all about getting helicopter-like planes. And that's a phrase that's very important to
00:46:28
Speaker
understand. So you're not exactly replacing a helicopter by saying, hey, okay, fine, you have to have the chopper that runs on top of the helicopter. I will just replace the combustion engine by an electric motor and supply the electric motor with the battery pack sort of current, right? That is not what we're talking about, right? And the reason for that is if I actually do that, I'm still going to be as noisy as helicopters are because the noise is coming from the chopper, right?
00:46:53
Speaker
And that's not acceptable in an urban setting when you're actually sleeping and the next door neighbor wants to catch a flight and he takes a taxi to go to the airport at four o'clock in the morning and you're actually woken up. That's not on. So noise is one of those biggest constraints. And that's how, again, electric actually makes a lot of sense because
00:47:13
Speaker
With electric, the motors are actually very, very compact. And you can now replace one large rotor on top of a helicopter with multiple small rotors to which you simply have to run wires from the battery to these different motors that are compact and powering each of these rotors. And these small rotors then offer two things. One is it offers an enormous amount of redundancy
00:47:35
Speaker
where you can afford to have one or two rotors fail and still be actually be held in the air and not fall down like a brick, which is a problem with helicopters. So safety is a huge thing. The second thing is they make much less noise. So simply because they're small, they actually turn much faster. They have a larger number of blades. They make noise in a higher frequency range that the human urine is less sensitive.
00:48:05
Speaker
So all of a sudden we are now having these quieter multi-rotor machines that would take off and land, but then that's not it. That's not enough. We need to essentially come up with a craft which is also going to have wings like a normal looking plane so that it will fly like a plane when it's going forward and take off and land like a helicopter with these multiple small rotors.
00:48:32
Speaker
Having wings gives you what advantage? It makes it more aerodynamic and therefore consumes less electricity. What is the advantage of wings? A quick answer to what you're saying is yes, but if I have to break down that particular answer,
00:48:51
Speaker
The quick answer is, if I have to actually continue to have these rotors, let's say you take a drone, a multi-copter drone, which has these multiple vertical rotors, or even the helicopter for that matter.
00:49:04
Speaker
So these rotors, big or small, helicopter or drone, whatever it is, they have to keep on running so that it stays up in the air. The rotors are the ones that are providing the upward force for the vehicle to actually stay up in the air, which means that they are guzzling power constantly.
00:49:24
Speaker
and guzzling power enough to be able to produce force that balances the entire weight of the aircraft. Whereas when you now have planes, the planes have wings. And when you go forward, you're having the wind come at you and flow around the wings above and below. And you now produce this imbalance of pressure on the top and bottom of the wing that will generate a lift force that actually gets the wing to be held up. And together with that, the entire aircraft gets held up.
00:49:54
Speaker
So what's balancing the weight of the aircraft now is actually the aerodynamic wing lift and not the multiple rotors or the single rotor or any of those things. That means you're not guzzling power from the battery for holding the weight of the aircraft. In that case, what are the engines for? The engines that you're having in this conventional winged planes is to primarily overcome the wind resistance, what we call as drag.
00:50:22
Speaker
Now, the wind resistance is typically about a tenth of the weight of the aircraft, which means that you're guzzling a lot less power when you're now having a wind plane. So what we have to do now in order to make this disruption in cost is to make this so economical, which means that we need to have the wings. The wings will allow you to go far because you're not consuming all the onboard batteries so quickly.
00:50:48
Speaker
So you can go a significant distance, kind of like about the 200 kilometers that I was talking about. But you also have to take off vertically and land vertically because you can't have runways in the middle of cities. So this is where you need to have the vertical rotors as well as the wings. And that's a bit more complicated design when compared to just making a simple plane or perhaps just making the multi-copter drone.
00:51:16
Speaker
And that's the new art that is actually emerging in the urban aerial mobility or the urban aviation space today. And that's a new science, new technology, new product development. So that's a most fascinating aspect of what's happening in aerospace today. OK. And like, how far along are you in this journey? Like, rather first, tell me the milestones and where you've reached. Right.
00:51:43
Speaker
And I think that also dials back to how do you actually tell the investors what the milestones are so that they can clog the next rounds and stuff is what we had actually asked before. So what we did to begin with before we could even go to any investor was to bootstrap and show this kind of a rendering of wings and vertical rotors at the scale of like a tabletop. And that's capable of carrying somewhere between two to six kilograms of payload and staying up in the air and flying
00:52:12
Speaker
around for about, let us say, an hour and go a distance of about, let's say, 80 to 100 kilometers. So this is the first thing that we actually did. And this is something that we just bootstrapped. And once we did this, so it's kind of like a drone plus plus, if you will, because today a lot of people can actually put together drones with their pocket money.
00:52:38
Speaker
And we were actually doing something bigger than this. This was costing us like a few tons of lakhs of rupees. And so we bootstrapped that and then we made this and then showed it's flying and so on. So from there, the next step for us is to actually develop all the serious technologies that go into this plane that we're talking about and implement it in a subscale version, which is capable of carrying 50 kilograms of payload.
00:53:05
Speaker
And 50 kg is something so small that you can't actually have a human being sit in there and fly. So it is a cargo plane which will fly autonomously. What we're doing now is developing this 50 kg payload capacity autonomous flying cargo plane, all right, which is having a three meter wingspan and a three meter nose to tail kind of dimensions.
00:53:32
Speaker
And if it were not for the pandemic, we would have actually started fabricating this in May, and we are just about two months off, and we're just beginning to fabricate it now. And therefore, we expect that it'll actually be flying sometime in September, right? And then the plane design essentially goes through three stages, as far as the design itself is concerned, which is a conceptual design, a preliminary design, and a detailed design. So it's only after you finish your detailed design, pretty much, you actually start fabricating the plane.
00:54:02
Speaker
which is what we have done for the subscale version. And the full-scale version is actually a two-seater, so it carries two people, which is equivalent to a 200 kg payload, if you want to say in terms of kgs of payload, or equivalent cargo that could be taken. And that's a four-meter wingspan, four-meter nose-to-tail kind of dimensions.
00:54:28
Speaker
That preliminary design is complete, and we are now getting into the detailed design phase that we will do in the next two to three months, and start fabricating that from October for the first prototype, and spend about four months to five months doing that. The subscale version takes about two months. This one will take about four to five months. And so sometime in February is when we expect to have our first takeoff of the full-scale prototype. That's where we are.
00:54:58
Speaker
Okay, okay. And does this need some sort of like government approval licensing? I mean, you I'm sure you can't just build play then start a ferry service. Yeah, so that's the other thing, right. So in fact, pretty much all the startups that I have has a governmental impact because let me tell you this, right. So we are supposed to actually do societal impact and there are two ways of doing so completely private play, which is like, you know, let's say you have social media and so on. You're also
00:55:28
Speaker
But also saying social media is actually having a lot of governmental control today. So anytime we are actually trying to impact people, governmental regulations will come in. Because that's what governments are supposed to be doing, keeping people's interest in a democracy. So yes, the answer is very, very clearly yes. So this holds for rockets, it's holds for even producing the crude, and definitely a resounding yes as far as the plane is concerned. So there are two parts to it.
00:55:56
Speaker
getting the plane itself certified for flight worthiness and that essentially means that the design, the prototyping, the manufacturing, all of that stuff goes through a certification process and the Civil Aviation Authority essentially certifies saying that this plane is now over and worthy of commercialization. It's not just about our worthiness, it's about
00:56:22
Speaker
We can actually do repeated flights 1,000 times ad infinitum right on and off. So that's the certification of the aircraft. The second part is actually the aviation framework.
00:56:36
Speaker
So today, for example, if I were, let's say, for example, I were, I were, I were Boeing that this, you know, gined up on India all of a sudden, and I made a jumbo jet. All right. The next question is, there should have been airports, right? Or there should be airports and we need to be able to take up, there should be runways and all of that stuff, right? There's like an ATC and so on, right? So all of the stuff is the aviation infrastructure and the framework and the protocols for the operations. All right.
00:57:07
Speaker
And then there are standards for following all of those things and so on. So in this case, what we're talking about is urban aerial mobility, right? And the question is like, hey, what is the framework for urban aerial mobility? It's not happening yet, right? So nobody knows, right? So there are lots of different governments at different levels at the national level or the state level or the city level around the world who are actually grappling with this problem. And India is also doing this, right? So they're beginning to think, do you need to have framework? And the answer is, initially, probably not, because
00:57:37
Speaker
We know that helicopters are allowed to fly over city skies. And that's not been a problem in the sense they have the protocols, they have the standard operating procedures for doing that. So in the initial phase where you are actually looking at only a few tens of these planes flying the skies, taking people across, they may start with the existing protocols.
00:58:04
Speaker
All right. But as you now get into crowded skies, they obviously should be looking at how to automate this process in a way that is still very safe. Right. And how do you actually have some kind of oversight that is that is scalable and that is sustainable. Right. And that's the thing that a lot of people are actually looking at on what framework is required. And similarly, for the operations itself, like let's say. So one thing is the plane maker. Right.
00:58:32
Speaker
The other one is like the plane operator and then the third one is the regulator. So the plane operator is kind of like the airlines equivalent within the city. And they will have to actually worry about what are the landing sites that you have to have and what are the regulations around those landing sites that are permissible today and so on.
00:58:54
Speaker
which of these landing sites should have like fast charging and recharging points and so that you will be able to charge your vehicle as you're doing these multiple trips and so on. So that's actually a logistics problem that people will have to, so these are things that will actually begin to emerge as we speak. But the starting point is to make the thing and get it to certified. Okay and
00:59:18
Speaker
you don't intend to actually run the service the plan is to build the planes and find service like logistics operators in a way who would run the service correct so it makes sense for us to actually keep our focus on the plane making because as an aerospace engineer that's where I belong right
00:59:37
Speaker
So there are two kinds of operators who can actually move into this as operators more easily than anybody else. One is the urban mobility providers like the Ubers and the Olars of the world who have been able to have apps and all of that stuff.
00:59:55
Speaker
But yet, I think if you now look at what Uber or Rula is doing, they are now just about beginning to make, what do you call, vehicles and own or operate vehicles by themselves. Otherwise, it's been basically an aggregator model. And it's been an asset-like model. The other industry that is actually used to dealing with assets is primarily the airlines.
01:00:22
Speaker
So the airlines know how to deal with planes. And it's just that these are actually slightly different kinds of planes. And they need to sort of have like a disrupted mindset now to say, these are not really those big, big planes which go on like very long runways and all that stuff. These are more like cars, but still planes, right? So they need to find a new ground in between where they are beginning to look at planes as just about like winged cars. Okay, because it isn't talking about flying cars.
01:00:52
Speaker
So either the current urban mobility players have to kind of like upskill themselves to be able to handle flying cars or the airlines will have to actually sort of downskill themselves to say, hey, this is not so big for us to actually make a big fuss about, let's actually get going. Otherwise the cost will be huge.
01:01:12
Speaker
Okay, the operational cost of these. So these are the two players that we should be targeting as our partners, or in fact, as a matter of fact, customers for us, but it's more like a B2B play for us, right? And what is the second B for us is actually either of these people as our customers. So there are these companies who have these helicopters, like, you know, if you go to Vashnu Devi, you have the helicopter charter companies. Right, right, right. So they would be the easiest fit, I guess, because
01:01:42
Speaker
Like replacing a conventional helicopter with a new plane in question, maybe would be a easy thing. So that typically works for a point to point, which is always going to be only one point, another point. Right. So they're kind of like fixed point routes. Right. In the aviation parlance, actually what we are looking at is what's called as NSOPs, non scheduled operations. OK.
01:02:03
Speaker
So which essentially means that you're not saying that I'm going to go only from place A to place B, and I'm going to take off only at this particular time and land there at another particular time. That's not the way it works. This is going to be a taxi, which means that you should be able to hail. And it has to actually reach wherever, the closest to where you are. And it has to then fly you to a place the closest to where you want to get. So that's going to be so dynamic. And that's being done by the urban mobility players.
01:02:33
Speaker
so far, but it's not being done by the airlines. And so it's a hybrid that has to actually come about on how do you kind of dynamically talk to an air traffic control, if you will, that sort of regulates this traffic in the air and then so on. So all of these things are up about to come in the next few to several years. It's going to be a very exciting time for us in this upcoming decade.
01:02:58
Speaker
So but for this reason to come true, would it need a lot of landing pads? I mean, yeah, that's exactly it. So now now you're asking the right question to the right guy. OK, so what is so I told you, right? So there are three things about an Indian deep deep tech startup, right? And the first one is innovation. All right. And the second one is we're actually doing it out of India. The third one is we're actually doing it extremely quickly. All right.
01:03:27
Speaker
Now, so the question that you have to ask is what is so innovative about you? And the answer is we actually make the most compact attack scene in the world at four meter by four meter. The reason why I actually specified those dimensions for you at the risk of boring you is to say that go check it out. You won't find a plane that is actually shorter than four meters. All right. So it's just about two. It's less than two car parking lots with.
01:03:57
Speaker
And that's exactly what we wanted to do because we want to be able to land and take off from pretty much any terrace. So the vision that we have is when you step out of an apartment that you live in to get to work in the morning, you don't go downstairs in your lift to get your car parking lot. You actually go upstairs now to the terrace to actually hail in our taxi.
01:04:25
Speaker
That's the direction in which we are heading. So we are essentially going to be looking at pretty much every city in which this will happen. Look at the aerial view of the city. And find every space that is actually about six meters by six meters. You need to have about one and a half times the dimensions of the aircraft to be able to take off and land. And that's six meters by six meters. That's 36 square meters.
01:04:54
Speaker
that's 360 approximately 360 square feet that's actually less than a one-bedroom apartment worth of space on the terrace and so when you're now looking at these high-rise apartment complexes usually they are at least about a three-bedroom apartment right so two-bedroom to three-bedroom apartment so we can easily find a lot of space unless they are completely infested with solar panels or whatever it is right so that's an
01:05:19
Speaker
or you have like a pop in complexes with a compound and you have like a play area and all that stuff, you should be able to easily find a 360 square feet worth of space for a landing on the ground, right? Somewhere next to a swimming pool or whatever it is, right? So these things will actually become extremely ubiquitous, right? So in fact, the actual registered company name of E-plane is what's called as UB fly technologies. And the UB fly actually comes from ubiquitous flying. That's actually our model.
01:05:49
Speaker
Right, right, right. So how much is the size needed for a conventional helipad? Like you're saying you need six into six. What does a conventional helipad need? Right, that depends on the helicopter. So we are a two-seater plane and the closest we can actually compare is like let's say a four-seater helicopter. I mean there are two-seater helicopters but I don't think we are actually flying cities and taking people. So if you now want to use the same application, like a taxi application, the minimum is about a four-seater helicopter.
01:06:18
Speaker
And that would require about 10 meters. Wow. OK. OK. So your two-seater plane would seat one pilot and one passenger. Yeah. So I think the current regulations abroad today are essentially saying that it needs to be human piloted and it can't be an autonomous plane. But all the other players are actually developing autonomous
01:06:46
Speaker
aircraft and they have sort of rolled back to doing a human piloted version. So we have had the hindsight advantage of coming a little late to look at all the mistakes that they have done and we are directly targeting a human piloted version which has the option to fly autonomous as well.
01:07:05
Speaker
So why am I saying that is because we think that Indian authorities will actually go along with the rest of the world and say it has to be human piloted because psychologically you don't want to fly in an autonomous plane. So we have a human piloted, what should I say, a provision. Now what we would do is to actually clock a lot of autonomous cargo flights.
01:07:34
Speaker
And because cargo is okay to do autonomous, particularly outside of city limits and stuff like when it's partially populated or like in the coastal, in the sea or whatever it is. And with permissions, all permissions obtained and so on. So we clock those flights, we can actually get a large amount of data set for getting the,
01:08:02
Speaker
confidence levels up on what we call autonomous flights. Now, over time, we expect that if not next. So for example, in 2020 February, just before the pandemic became like a huge thing, I was attending this conference and then called MOOC 2020, where all these different urban area mobility players around the world had complicated. And at that time, nobody was really, you know, clued into the pandemic.
01:08:30
Speaker
And they were basically all actually showing a lot of enthusiasm and optimism that by 2023, they will actually get autonomous flights certified. All right. So now through the pandemic, one thing that's actually happening is by FAA, the US Federal Aviation Administration.
01:08:52
Speaker
they have actually announced sometime in May that the first electric aircraft would be certified for human piloting version by later this year. And IASA, which is the European Authority, had already certified an electric plane, a conventional electric plane, not a vertical takeoff plane, asked you. So the electric plane has been certified last year. So the certification of electric planes has already started. But this is human piloting.
01:09:18
Speaker
And what happened last year is conventional takeoff. What happened with F8, this year could be conventional takeoff. And what we are now beginning to think is that the VTOLs, the vertical takeoff and landing electric planes with human pilot version could actually get certified in 2022, 2023 timeframe.
01:09:37
Speaker
which means that the autonomous versions could actually take still longer to get certified, maybe another three, four years. Why is that important? Because in the markets that are like America or Europe, particularly US, I would think, having human piloted operations for urban aerial mobility is actually going to bleed those operators. They will have to earn money in order to be able to make it sustainable and the ticket price to be comparable.
01:10:08
Speaker
Your pilot salaries would be pretty high. Well, you could say that these pilots are not like these plane pilots. It's OK. I mean, essentially, it's what you call a demand supply equilibrium. So if you now open up these planes, so there will be lots of pilot schools. And then there will be lots of people that actually go to pilot schools. And the pilot cost will actually become, what do you call, salaries will actually become lower. But still, they are salaries.
01:10:36
Speaker
So the interesting thing is I think last month there was a McKinsey report that actually conducted a survey on urban aerial mobility across about six countries around the world. And this included India, Brazil, I think Russia, Germany, US, and China, I think. And the most interesting thing is it's mainly India where customers were actually willing to pay up anywhere from three to five times for urban aerial mobility.
01:11:04
Speaker
Whereas people in Germany and the US were saying they were not willing to give any more money. Because they don't have traffic headaches that India has. Correct. Right. And of course, Indians are actually a little less safety conscious, whereas the Western mind is like a little bit more worried about the stuff.
01:11:22
Speaker
So everything put together. So there was a little bit more lukewarm response when compared to India. And India is actually the most excited place for this. So what it means for these other people is that unless they actually get the autonomous flights done, they will be bleeding money and they will be burning cash. And they will essentially have that push for getting autonomous ones certified.
01:11:50
Speaker
and when that happens and we just ride the wave right behind them and when that happens all we have to do is turn a switch and and then make it autonomous right and and and the moment we make it autonomous we actually get two passengers right if we pay passengers all right uh now until then what happens like what is our business case what what's our business doing right the answer is
01:12:11
Speaker
Because we are actually coming out of India and we are making this plane very compact and very small and it has the capacity to actually land and take off everywhere, it's possible for us to actually offer this plane at a fairly low price as a set cost to begin with. And when compared to a lot of other people. Just to give you a comparison, what we expect is that we can actually position our plane to cost, let's say about some 2 crores of rupees, which could be like about 300k dollars.
01:12:41
Speaker
Whereas the cheapest such helicopter is about 400, 500k dollars, right? Half of it, right? But all these other people are actually positioning their planes to cost anywhere upwards of 1 million to 5 million dollars. That's a kind of, right? So their asset prices are actually much higher when compared to what we are thinking about. And the use case of factory is ubiquitous access to every customer.
01:13:06
Speaker
Like with this and a piloted version, we still can actually start making money right from day one for every trip, right? It is our calculation, which will mean the thing about the Indian thing is it's so price sensitive. So the mountains are not very high, right? So which means that our breakeven time is about somewhere around one and a half years to two years for the operator, right? But it's still not bad, right? So one and a half to two years is something that people are actually willing to invest on, all right?
01:13:34
Speaker
So we have a fairly good story going on, even with the human piloted version, that when we now switch to autonomous, actually we can do a killing, right? So, and with the same play, if you actually go to the US and then we now disrupt the cost and make it comparable to like a Uber black or a Uber, the premium version, right? And essentially say that you ought to pay the same price, but you will actually get there in about one fifth of the time, right?
01:14:01
Speaker
because they are saying they don't want to pay more money, but saving time is something they're going to take, right? We can actually compete much better than other people, right, that way. And there, the break even time becomes much smaller, shorter, because our asset, asset costing, initial asset costing is actually very, very low, right? So this is the kind of, this is why I told you that the fact that we are actually doing something innovative and something
01:14:27
Speaker
you know, out of India and something that is so frugal, this is a story that is actually waiting to come out. All right. And when it comes out, I think it is actually going to the optimism that we have is that it's going to come out and with a great force because the implications are actually significant. Right, right. So there are two separate lines I want to pursue. One is more specific to E-Plate, but second is again coming back to the vision of
01:14:57
Speaker
ubiquitous flying. Is there a need to file a flight plan or something like that? Like you said that on demand you can go from any point A to any point B. So does this need to be recorded somewhere with some central authority that this is my flight plan? Is there an approval process? And how would this work if there were
01:15:23
Speaker
hundreds of e-planes in the sky, like traffic, basically. That's what I was asking. We have figured out road traffic through red lights and stuff like that. How would it work in the air? Blockchain. And that's a new startup idea. It's a new startup idea, but it is a startup idea.
01:15:47
Speaker
So applying blockchain to urban areas and abilities is one of those great ideas that's expected to happen. So the quick answer for that question is easily this. So yes, the answer is yes, we need to file a flight plan. So there is absolutely no dilution in the standards that we have to maintain from current deviation. So a flight plan has to be maintained or defiled, and we have to get an authorization
01:16:17
Speaker
And we have to actually fly the trajectory. And that flight path will actually be monitored. All of these things will have to happen. So current aviation, for example, let's say you're actually taking a flight from Chennai to Mumbai. So you do what's called as waypoint navigation, which means that you actually have the Tirupati ATC. We have a, I don't know, some Bellari ATC. We have a Pune ATC. Then we have the Mumbai ATC.
01:16:46
Speaker
So there is like a baton passing that happens across these different agencies to track the plane to make sure that it's actually following these so-called waypoints. So we do an exact same waypoint navigation, except that it is all automated. So the plane itself actually does an autonomous waypoint navigation, which is a path planning that it does. And today's aircraft also do this.
01:17:09
Speaker
So if you get a flight plan authorization to take off from Chennai and then your waypoints or whatever I mentioned, the autopilot will actually do the waypoint navigation and this path planning by itself. And it will actually set the plane on the course to follow these waypoints. And that will actually get into play in the urban aerial mobility space too. If you're actually taking off from, let's say, if you're in Bangalore and you're actually taking off from Guatemala,
01:17:38
Speaker
And you want to actually go to, let's say, Indira Nagar, and you have these waypoints that are like some, I don't know, some Jayanagar and Baspangudi, I don't know. All those play there. Maybe a bit off there. So all of that stuff, yes. We will actually go through all of that. The whole thing is at scale, when you're now doing these things like what you're saying is 100 planes, all of this will actually be automated. Right. It would have to be. I mean, there's no other way. Correct.
01:18:05
Speaker
So, and that's part of a larger plan that will be happening as we speak. The point essentially is, if you really think about it, for a credible UAM service to just get started, it's sufficient to actually start even with about 10 planes because each trip is actually going to take only 10 minutes. And give about another five, 10 minutes for a passenger ingress, egress. And let's say, for example, they have these protocols that they are demanding initially, at least,
01:18:35
Speaker
that we need to have the pilot go around the plane, do a visual inspection. And then they also say, no, no, no, this is all aviation, so we need to have the passenger frisked. And who would do that? The pilot would do it. So you do all of these circuits, and then it actually takes 20 minutes for you to go from place A to place B, which is still good. And you can actually do about three trips an hour.
01:19:05
Speaker
That's exactly where the other innovative aspect about what we do comes in, which is like we actually fly very slow for a winged aircraft and that's not so easy. I'll explain that a little bit later.
01:19:18
Speaker
what it essentially allows us to do is to conserve battery on board and to extend it up to about six trips, 10 trips, and so on. So we can actually be doing these multiple short hops of about 10, 20 kilometers in about 10, 20 minutes for about three, four hours. And then we actually go through a charting process for about 15 minutes to half an hour, let us say. And then again, we are up flying and again do the starting and then again up flying. So in about a
01:19:46
Speaker
is 16, 17 hours time from morning, six o'clock to night, 10 o'clock or whatever. We could actually be clocking anywhere up to 50 trips with one single plane. And with about 10 planes, you're actually doing 500 trips. And when you're not starting off, your price point is probably about twice Uber, let us say. And that is actually deliberately so in order to have the demand supply equilibrium at a slightly higher level.
01:20:15
Speaker
And you're starting. You don't need all of this flight path authorization and all of those things done automatically. You can't file flight plan. So the way it used to happen with helicopters in the past is they would actually pick up the phone and get the authorization from the ATC.
01:20:36
Speaker
So you can set up a WhatsApp messaging service or something like this today. I'm just coming up with something. I didn't quite read it. But you can come up with a very simple communication process by which you can actually get the flight path authorization. And that's the way we will actually start this process. It's not as if you need to have this entire paraphernalia set up for you to actually start.
01:21:00
Speaker
And if that's so, that's never going to happen. And even as you actually keep growing and you go to about 100 planes or 500 planes, something of that number is actually going to be very well enough for you to actually serve an entire city because each plane is clocking about 50 trips. But if you look at the number of taxis that are around the room, they are like in the thousands. That's because each trip taking about an hour or an hour and a half. So a taxi probably clocks about 5 to 10 trips max.
01:21:32
Speaker
So that's a completely different story over here. So you're not going to be crowded skies as much as the crowded roads that you see. And in the sky, you actually have several layers. So each flight will actually be in a path that is not going to be in the same altitude as the other one. So essentially, you have several imaginary roads, if you go in the sky, that are one above the other, that can be used by different flights.
01:22:01
Speaker
And they all go as a crow flies anyway. So they don't have to actually, the flight corridor that we're talking about is only in the altitude. They don't have to actually go straight and take a right and then take a left, nothing. So that's the whole idea here. Very, very different. So I get a feeling that you are a little overly optimistic. And I mean, I just find it so hard to believe that the government will be able to keep pace.
01:22:31
Speaker
definitely a manual flight approval thing cannot work in this. Government will need to automate and bring in technology and stuff like that. And like you are assuming three trips, which is assuming that the demand is there, like the place where the plane lands, there's already a customer waiting. What I'm talking about is what we call as a steady state operation. Right. Right. So let's say, for example, I make one plane, right? There is no way I'm going to expect like three trips, three trips an hour with that one plane. Right.
01:23:01
Speaker
So the point I'm talking about is the credible operations actually start with at least about 10 planes a city. And at that level, you might still not find operating at three trips an hour. But it is doable. It's doable as the demand grows. That's the point I'm trying to say. That is number one. The second point is you might be surprised about the government.
01:23:29
Speaker
And this is something that we cannot really bet on. But we have early signs from governmental people about extreme level of optimism that they are exuding about the whole thing. And that's because the government wants to showcase something like this for India. And a lot of foreign governments, a lot of foreign governments like, whether it is US or Europe or any of those people, they are already up and thinking about all these processes that I'm talking about.
01:23:59
Speaker
And in the Indian government, the Civil Aviation authorities, they have just about, I think, put out one of the very, very user-friendly or business-friendly drone policy. And they are now beginning to actually pay attention to the urban aerial mobility policy.
01:24:18
Speaker
And what signals we are actually getting is that if the user friendliness or the business friendliness that they have actually incorporated in the drone policies, if that's anything to go by, we should actually see an accelerated approach to adopting and implementing urban aerial mobility as well within a short period of time. Right. Yeah. UPI is an example of what the government can achieve when it's motivated. That's true. Correct.
01:24:47
Speaker
I mean, and if you really notice, they've actually done a lot of such things, right? So for example, the the other the other is actually like the world's largest identity scheme and UPI. And I mean, they now do like some government, what do you call purchase portal, like a government email. So a lot of such things are actually happening because e-governance is enabling all of these things. And a lot of the lot of the stuff that you talked about, which is the flight authorization and monitoring, it's all electronic. It's all
01:25:18
Speaker
Those are not much of a hardware. It's actually more software and internet, right? So that's more easily doable when compared to the hard work that I'm doing. The other line I want to pursue is more about e-plane. So you said by Feb you will have a plane with 200 kg carrying capacity do it like a successful try run.
01:25:45
Speaker
So what next after that? Like, by when will you reach a monetization stage where you would be actually selling planes to operators? Right. So, yeah, I think there is a depends on what has happened in the past versus what could happen in the future. Right. So that is take some leap up to the past versus looking for better returns in the future.
01:26:12
Speaker
So the goal is that we will make about five to eight prototypes through 2022, after the first prototype flights and put them through certification and clock hours cumulatively for getting the certification, making the mandatory number of hours of flight.
01:26:37
Speaker
And that we expect to happen over about a two to two and a half year timeframe. So which means that from early 2022, we are into mid to second half of 2024. All right.
01:26:50
Speaker
And during this time, let's say, for example, in 2022 is when I'm actually making these five to eight prototypes. In 2023 through 2024, I should be actually busy setting up a factory where I can put out like 100 planes. And that's not a lot, because if you actually compare it with like an ad-taxi, as in like a car,
01:27:15
Speaker
Cars actually roll out of factories at much higher pace when compared to 100 a year. But this 100 a year is kind of like an initial output. So beyond about 2025, we will have to actually have factories that are going to put out these planes in the thousands. But prior to that, just to test the market with the initial UAM, like the 10 planes per city kind of implementation,
01:27:43
Speaker
it's sufficient to do what we're thinking, right? And that's kind of like test the market, test the operations and so on. And that's the level at which we will probably expect to get investments or partnerships and then all of that stuff. So actually I'm not as optimistic as what you're thinking. I'm actually probably like taking baby steps, but these baby steps are still like big steps by maybe let's say other industry standards.
01:28:10
Speaker
Hm, right, right, right, okay. So by 2025, you are looking at 100 planes, like what, annually being sold or monthly? Oh, no, no. So the first step in like 2023, 2024 would be 100 planes a year kind of thing. But progressively in 2025, 2026, we have to set up new plants that will actually throw out thousands of, a thousand planes a year, that kind of thing, right?
01:28:40
Speaker
So that's when we have to actually ramp up the market. But to answer the question that you asked, when will we actually see the initial UAM? And the reason why I'm saying what I'm saying is that I don't want to wait until this big
01:28:56
Speaker
a framework of autonomous ATCs and flight authorizations and all those things to happen. I won't actually push this into the market and get a UAM started with existing laws that operate for helicopters. And that is doable with about 10 planes a city. And that's the reason why we are actually being a bit modest about it, rather than looking very aggressive. Because our job is to actually make the planes and let them fly.
01:29:24
Speaker
And we have to get the government to come and set up the flight authorization and monitoring infrastructure. And since we can't comment on that behalf, we will basically say, the earliest you're actually going to see this, and maybe sometime in 2024, late 2024 is what we think. And this would be cargo or human being? So the cargo can actually happen much sooner. So we could probably be looking at cargo versions happen in 2023 itself.
01:29:54
Speaker
All right, but I'm not very sure if we will be able to see this in urban areas, right? That requires permissions and like new regulations. So I'm always talking about, but it's possible that actually if it's human piloted, it's allowed because that's like a helicopter, current helicopter. So it's always the question of like, what is currently allowed? And am I actually trying to do that? In that case, it's only the certification of the aircraft that matters.
01:30:24
Speaker
Because the existing laws for operations, they'll allow it. So we will always take the path of least resistance. Whatever is allowed is what we will do to begin with. We're not going to wait for changes to happen and all that. So in the long term, do you see cargo as a bigger part of the business or passengers? Indeed, the cargo is a bigger part of the business, except that you have to actually look at that segment of cargo that needs to get there in a hurry.
01:30:52
Speaker
Because cargo is one of those things that doesn't have to actually get there in a tearing hurry, right? For most part. Although you will actually see that there is a trillion dollar business, blah, blah, blah, but you have to ask the question, how soon do you want this stuff? And that segment actually is kind of small, right? And that may be comparable to the, what do you call, the passenger urban, a real mobility. And
01:31:21
Speaker
That play would actually be on just as well as the passenger. So because we can do passenger, we can do cargo. No, but say by 2030, you know, I'm talking like that long term. Do you think cargo would be as big as passenger or cargo would be like a small part of the pilot? No, cargo would be as big as passenger for that kind of speed. I'll tell you one more statistic. So there is this other survey.
01:31:45
Speaker
that actually has shown that Indian customers are actually willing to pay about more 50% extra for an overnight delivery by these e-commerce companies like Flipkart and so on. And right now, you don't get that. So you order an Amazon or Flipkart or so, you will actually get it about three, four days later. Whereas people want that instant gratification, like how they will actually walk into your store and buy something and start using it.
01:32:11
Speaker
So if I want a TV in 10 minutes, then the thing is that the thing is like what is actually the bottleneck here, right? That is that is not allowing for this overnight delivery. Many times it's actually waiting through city traffic to get to your home. OK, from from like a warehouse or whatever it is.
01:32:31
Speaker
So there are and there are multiple segments here. So there is like something has to be shipped to your city and that can be done by a plane right from the to the airport. And then there is like a cargo hold, which is like a warehouse from the reaction gets to this fulfillment centers and the from the fulfillment centers, it actually gets distributed to your homes. Right.
01:32:50
Speaker
So the warehouse to this one, what you call the full-family centers are all multiple different trips on the road in the city traffic and that is actually holding them up, right? So the mid-mile segment is something that we will actually be easily able to handle and that can offer you more close to overnight deliveries and all of that stuff. And that will be efficient also because point A and point B are fixed. Absolutely.
01:33:15
Speaker
Right. So what is your vision 2030? How big do you see yourself in 2030? How many planes? What kind of top line would you be at? And would you be largely selling to customers in India? Or would you be a global company? What do you think? What do you have in your mind for that long term vision? Right. So we have very set goals for the near term.
01:33:44
Speaker
The ideas are, it's more like ideas for 2030. And I think that's reasonable. So the set goals here are that we will actually try to push this aircraft in the time frame that I talked about, which is about 2024-ish, into the urban area mobility market.
01:34:03
Speaker
And while we are now scaling up, as I said, into the thousands of planes per year in the 2025, 2026 time frame, we expect that we will also actually get certified in other geographies around the world. And we should be in a position to actually enter at the level of at least about 10% of those markets, because those markets actually have a lot of competition. And for example, the US does not really require, for most part, very, very compact aircraft that we are hosting off.
01:34:31
Speaker
except in downtown traffic and so on. But we will still have our own segment because we will actually beat the downtown traffic. And then we can actually get land in front of like suburban home because typical suburban home will have like a two-car garage, and that's good enough for us to land. So we will have a certain advantage that we can offer. And considering the competition, and if you're not so aggressive abroad,
01:34:56
Speaker
we might actually be able to target about a 10% of that to begin with in the 2025, 2026 timeframe, the next five years, let's say. That's essentially what we expect to do. And we could probably be looking at the Asia-Pacific region all the way to Australia. All of those places are actually up in the reckoning. So this is what we would do now. But the next thing is, but remember, we are actually essentially a plane company.
01:35:25
Speaker
which means that I'm actually going to be thinking about what's my next product. So if I'm doing a piloted single paid passenger seat plane, I'm essentially banking on the fact that today's Uber roller travel, the same trips, 60% of them, 60 to 66% of them are single passenger rides. And that's the initial market that I'm actually trying to capture. Then I'll ask the question, hey, what do I do with the remaining 35% or 40%?
01:35:55
Speaker
and I need to make a larger plane. And so I would, and then I would probably then say, why do I actually make a two-seater or a two-pass meter or three-seater thing? I'll directly go there like a five-seater, right? Now this game can be played over, let's say starting from the next two years. I don't have to wait until five years. I can actually start looking at my next product in the next two years while this plane is still getting pushed into the market, right? I can then block the next 35%, right?
01:36:24
Speaker
of the segment. And that could be like our next, what should I say, product line. But since we are fundamentally an electric plane company, the other use case is actually this nearby cities that you have to actually clock. And by then, we would actually expect battery technologies to get better. And so we can actually start making these conventional takeoff and landing planes
01:36:52
Speaker
that are, let's say, like a 19-seater for what's called as regional aviation. So it becomes like a bus, an air bus that is going to go from one town to the other, suburbs, and so on. And so that's actually a lot easier to do than the VTOLs that they're doing.
01:37:12
Speaker
It's just that you need to have the infrastructure and we need to have the markets. We need to be able to disrupt the cost structure of the operations. All of that stuff is actually possible as the batteries improve. And that's the direction in which we'll be going. So in your wildest days, how big do you see yourself with 2030? What kind of turnover? We think that we can become a unicorn in about five years.
01:37:42
Speaker
That's our current, but a unicorn that actually doesn't make a big difference in aviation. So yeah, I mean, that's the, I mean, maybe it looked cocky, but from aviation perspective, that's our modest goal. I mean, if that gave you a sense of the kind of scale we are thinking about. Yes, yes, absolutely, absolutely.
01:38:06
Speaker
So you told me about the three legs that you were presenting to investors and the innovation leg of it, you know, that being able to do something truly unique
Innovative VTOL Design and E-Plane's IP
01:38:20
Speaker
from India. So can you talk a bit about that? Like what exactly are the things that are truly unique about Eplane? Right. So again, this is market driven. So unless you actually know what's the market that you're serving,
01:38:34
Speaker
you can't actually configure a product that serves the market the best, which is to offer a very good product market fit. And from there, you now actually ask the question, do we have the current technology that will be able to generate this product, or do we have to actually develop some new technology? And so it's kind of like a backward, what should I say, push for the technology rather than say, I have this tech, I won't actually find out what the market is for it.
01:39:02
Speaker
So here, in this case, what we are essentially saying is we are making an ad taxi. And an ad taxi fundamentally is one of those things that will keep on flying trip after trip after trip. And how do you get that to happen, which means that you have to do two things. One, fundamentally, you should actually have a very long range on a single charge. But the second thing is you should be able to make multiple short hops in a single charge.
01:39:30
Speaker
Now, I already told you that we want to be the most compact in the world, which means that my wings are extremely short. And how do I make multiple short hops is I have to make sure that I don't fly very fast, because by the time I fly to this very high design speed that I have to get to, I am already clocking a certain distance. And then from there, I have to decelerate back to stopping. And it essentially means that I will not be able to do very short trips.
01:40:01
Speaker
And the long range then actually doesn't really help me because I will be doing like two long trips and then I'll actually run out of battery. So I'm not doing the multiple short hops anymore. So we have to figure out how to fly slowly while we're actually having a very compact range.
01:40:18
Speaker
And that's extremely counter-intuitive in aerospace because you will see these very large wingspan gliders that go very slowly, or you will see these very fast-flying fighter aircraft that have very compact wings. So these are actually the two ends of the spectrum. So we now try to beat this by saying, is there a way by which I can actually make a plane that is compact and will also fly slow? Well, one question I have here
01:40:46
Speaker
So you're saying flying slow is very tough as compared to flying fast. Why is that? Particularly when you have very small wings because how do you fly? The wings are the ones that are producing the lift, right? And you have to have the air flow around the wings and you need to have enough surface area for the lift to be produced.
01:41:06
Speaker
The faster you fly, the greater the difference in the bottom and the top surface, to be able to push you up. So you don't need a very large wing. Otherwise, you need to have a very large wing because you're flying slow, the difference that you're actually creating between the top and the bottom surface is very small. So you now intervene. Basically, you need speed to overcome gravity. Absolutely. OK, got it. So speed is what you're actually trying to do to get the wings more effective.
01:41:36
Speaker
and afford smaller wings. Here we are actually beset with smaller wings because we had to be compact, and we have to also fly slow because we want to make these short halves. So how do you do this is where we now say, hey, here is where we're actually making a VTOL. And people have actually looked at VTOL as a burden because the moment you actually take off,
01:41:58
Speaker
your vertical rotors that allow you to take off are actually shut down, and you are now counting with the wings to balance the weight of the aircraft. And you're carrying these vertical rotors as a dead weight all the way until you land, and then you don't start operating until land. All right? Now, so people actually say, well, why don't we actually tilt these rotors forward so that we are making use of them? The answer is, I already told you, in the forward flight, you're actually trying to overcome only the wind resistance. And that's a tenth of the weight of the aircraft that you are carrying until you hook off.
01:42:28
Speaker
So you don't need to tilt all these rotors at all. And so there is so much excess capacity that you were carrying these vertical rotors when you lift it off that you're still carrying a lot of it as dead weight. And tilting these rotors also means a certification hazard because there is a failure mode out there. What if the tilting actually did not work? Where do you mean it? Right. More moving parts means more risk.
01:42:56
Speaker
So there is really no point in tilting. So in which case, can I actually ask the question, can I make use of these guys somehow, right? They're the vertical rotors, right? So I'll put it another way. When you're trying to marry two technologies so that they will work in different parts, different legs of the journey, right? The problem is they actually become a disadvantage in the other leg of the journey when they're not working. So how do you actually get to marry them so that it's not just the advantages that are getting married, but the disadvantages are not getting married too.
01:43:27
Speaker
So the way to phrase this is, is there a way by which I can get my vertical rotors to participate and aid the wing in doing its job of generating the lift? And that's exactly what we have cracked. So we have essentially come up with an IP where we position these rotors in such a way around the wing that the wing generates an enormous amount of lift rather than
01:43:53
Speaker
just the combined lift of what the wing would do alone versus what the rotors would do alone. This is what we call as a synergistic lift. And with this, we are able to then say we can actually afford a compact wing as well as fly quite slowly. And this is the reason why we are able to actually say we can do multiple short hops in a single charge just as well as we can do one long trip in a single charge. That's why it's an ad taxi.
01:44:21
Speaker
the angle at which the vertical rotors are placed is unique like that angle allows the angle it's actually the position itself we are not changing we are not changing the angle we are always making it face vertically up right yeah so the angle is 90 degrees basically yeah but but it actually does something to the wings that will enable the wings to actually work much much better okay
01:44:48
Speaker
I'm not going to say what the subject is, because it's too much science as well as I don't want to put out what I'm doing. Got it. Got it. Got it. OK. But the point, essentially, is that in that sense, we are actually the best at taxi in the world. Because we are actually doing the, we are targeting the taxi market. And this is something that I can actually easily do when I'm doing a five-seater as well. A five-seater today that a lot of other people are doing is about 12 meters wide. All right.
01:45:15
Speaker
Whereas I can actually grow from something like a four meter to maybe a seven meter. But I'm still going to be the most compact that taxi. Take a look at the prototypes of the E-plane that Professor Satya and his team is building and I promise you that you will be blown away. Check them out at eplane.ai
01:45:39
Speaker
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01:45:59
Speaker
This episode of Founder Thesis Podcast is brought to you by Long Haul Ventures. Long Haul Ventures is the long haul partner for founders and startups that are building for the long haul. More about them is at www.longhaulventures.com