A former pro hockey player, Harvard grad Kyle Clark’s startup Beta Technologies may be on the verge of bringing workhorse battery-powered cargo planes to America’s skies that take off and land like helicopters.
, aim to transport people, enabling urbanites to hopscotch over traffic-snarled city streets. But Clark designed Alia primarily as a cargo aircraft, betting that a big market will develop for speeding ecommerce to and from suburban warehouses long before air taxis are considered safe to allow over city streets.
Beta investors Fidelity Management and Amazon are hoping the company will repeat the success of another electric vehicle startup they’ve bankrolled whose market cap recently topped $100 billion. “They see a lot of parallels between Beta and Rivian,” says Edward Eppler, a former Goldman Sachs investment banker who joined Beta as CFO after working on its Series A round, which raised $368 million in May at a $1.4 billion valuation.
But given Alia’s high price – roughly double a similarly sized new Cessna Grand Caravan and up to five times the used planes that dominate small cargo fleets – Beta and UPS know Alia will only make economic sense if it flies a lot. That will require a radical reshaping of delivery networks away from the longtime hub and spoke pattern under which cargo planes typically make just one roundtrip per day, funneling packages from a local airport to a sorting center.
After a private-equity group scooped up Dynapower in 2012, Clark found himself armed with a little cash. He motorcycled up and down the East Coast trying again to sell investors on his airplane design. With no takers, he cofounded a social-networking platform in 2014 that connected startups with talent and capital, hoping to use it as a springboard for his own plans.
“You get to tell by spending time with somebody face to face… who will smash down a wall to achieve success and who will just give you excuses,” says Rothblatt. “Kyle was equal to the best executive that I had ever worked with in my life before he'd done anything for me.” But regulatory risk is high. After all, the FAA has yet to certify even a conventional airplane with an electric propulsion system, let alone a vertical takeoff and landing one. Clark and Rothblatt’s conviction is that keeping the aircraft as simple as possible is key but it’s anyone’s guess as to how much time it will take the agency to assess Alia’s novel technology – or whether they’ll require modifications that sap its performance.
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