The first electric and VTOL aircraft by Zee.Aero, a startup reportedly heavily funded by Google co-founder Larry Page, is believed to have been spotted at the Hollister Airport in California, where the company has a hangar.
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For years now, Lit Motors has been developing its all-electric self-balancing two-wheel vehicles, often referred to as Auto-Balancing Electric Vehicle (AEV). It is described as an extremely efficient commuter vehicle thanks to its light weight, low mechanical drag with only 2 wheels touching the road and low aerodynamic drag because of its enclosed motorcycle shape.
The company announced having received over 1,000 reservations for the vehicle, but yet it can’t find its way to production. After several delays and despite backers like Mark Pincus, founder and CEO at Zynga, and Larry Page, founder of Google and CEO of Alphabet, the company is reportedly still looking for funding in order to bring the vehicle to production.
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Earlier this year, we wrote a profile on an interesting startup, Zee Aero, developing a battery-powered vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) aircraft near Google’s X lab. The company caught our attention when it started hiring talent from NASA, Tesla and Stanford.
At the time, we couldn’t confirm where the money was coming from, but today we learn that Alphabet’s billionaire CEO Larry Page is secretively behind the electric aircraft startup, reportedly financing it with over $100 million, and even setting up a competing startup, Kitty Hawk, to test another model.
The group’s proximity with Google led a lot of people to believe it was financed by the tech giant, but in fact, Page is financing the initiative himself and not through Alphabet or Google Ventures.
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