Seven years after its first test flight, German electric air taxi manufacturer Lilium has run out of funding and filed for insolvency for its two primary subsidiaries.
That's from a regulatory filing with the US SEC, in which Lilium stated it had failed to raise an injection of US$54 million (€50 million) from the German government to continue its operations. The company had raised over $1 billion from numerous investors over the years.
That's not just bad news for the eVTOL company, but also awful timing. It comes on the heels of the US FAA issuing new regulations governing "power-lift" (aka VTOL) aircraft earlier this week. Those rules pave the way for aviation firms like Lilium to clear regulatory hurdles and bring their machines to market.
And just a couple of days ago, Lilium had announced its partnership with GE Aerospace to "build scalable flight data management solutions that inform the right safety standards and guidelines for eVTOL operators."
As with many startups involved in moonshot projects, raising enough funding proved difficult for Lilium. Co-founder Daniel Wiegand gave us an idea of what that looked like in an interview last June, stating the company had $205 million in the bank at the time; that meant a runway "throughout this year, but not into the next year and the year after." The company subsequently initiated a $250 million funding round, but clearly that wasn't enough to keep Lilium in the air.
The firm was slated to deliver its first two Jet aircraft by 2026, along with an engineering simulator to facilitate certification ahead of those. It had also accepted orders of 20 Jets from US-based operator UrbanLink in May, and 100 Jets from Saudi Arabia's flag carrier in July.
The company hopes its two German subsidiaries – Lilium GmbH and Lilium eAircraft GmbH – will be able to attract new investors, and could potentially continue its operations "under the supervision of a custodian." CEO Klaus Roewe said, "... while there is no guarantee for success in insolvency proceedings, we hope that the Lilium Jet will get a chance for a fresh start after the self-administration process is completed.”
Meanwhile, other eVTOL taxi companies are keen to take off in the near future. Earlier this month, California-based Joby Aviation just received $500 million in funding from Toyota to support the company's certification and production efforts. It also made a public stock offering today to raise an additional $200 million.
In addition, Archer Aviation completed its first hover-to-horizontal transition flight in June, and recorded 400 successful test flights in 2024. The race to take to the skies – vertically and electrically – is tight.
Source: Lilium