Above: Nichola Bates, Managing Partner at Aerospace Xelerated and Head of Global Accelerators and Innovation Programmes at Boeing.
Courtesy Boeing

Following three successful programmes led by Boeing and supported by industry partners, this year’s programme will be run in partnership with Tawazun Council, the defence and security acquisitions authority of the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

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From 158 applications from around the world, the companies joining the programme come from the following countries: Australia, Canada, Japan, Netherlands, UAE, UK and USA.

Startups accepted into the programme will have the option to benefit from a £100K investment from Boeing, with potential for additional funding from partners. Through Aerospace Xelerated, startups will be introduced to a network of angel investors, venture capitalists and key stakeholders amongst the aerospace industry, throughout the 12-week programme. Successful companies will also get more than £100K in programme perks from partners including startup providers Oracle, Amazon, HubSpot, Digital Ocean and many more.

Nichola Bates, Managing Partner at Aerospace Xelerated and Head of Global Accelerators and Innovation Programs at Boeing, said: “We are delighted to welcome these innovative startups into our fourth cohort. The Aerospace Xelerated programme was designed to support the growth of startups – regardless of where they reside and this cohort is a testament to that. We are incredibly excited to see the solutions these companies will create to answer some of the key challenges in the aerospace sector.”

Abdulla Saif Al Awani, Chief Economic Program Officer at Tawazun Council, said: “Startups are increasingly playing a major role in the changes happening in the economic landscape. Tawazun has been supporting innovation since our early days and running this programme alongside Boeing will enable us to work closely with these amazing companies that are going to shape the future of aerospace.”

Alongside Boeing and Tawazun Council, programme partners include the Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA), GKN Aerospace and Etihad Airways. The partners will provide the cohort with industry insights and expertise. The selected companies will have access to strategists and technical experts for support in developing proof of concept opportunities and receive mentoring from a global network of experienced entrepreneurs, mentors and investors.

The 11 startups working on Digital Services and Solutions joining cohort four cover the programme’s key focuses: Flight & Passenger Journey Optimization; Supply Chain Intelligence; Next Generation Workforce; and Operational Efficiency.

Amongst the founding teams, 80% are first-time founders, 50% have a female founder and 50% are minority ethnic — 40% of the companies are seed stage and all of them operate in a hybrid model, having remote and in-person activities.

The cohort includes:

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

Since launching in 2019, startups involved in the three previous Aerospace Xelerated cohorts have gone on to raise over £100 million in additional funding and create over 150 jobs across the UK and globally. Organisations to work with past cohorts as partners or mentors include, but are not limited on to, PWC, Frazer-Nash, Chevron Technology Ventures and EasyJet.

The programme will run for 12 weeks, culminating in a Demo Day in April 2023.

For more information go to https://xelerated.aero