Four years after its launch, a key Boeing incubator plans to intensify selection runs to increase industry’s access to revolutionary ideas from up-and-coming entrepreneurs. The new Aerospace Xelerated (AX) is a funded, three-month accelerator for early-stage software start-ups.
Nichola Bates, Boeing’s head of global accelerators and innovation programs and AX managing director, said the new format would provide “scale,” although it remained too early to say how growth rates would change given the potential to dramatically increase the program’s impact. The project targets access to revenue opportunities across a range of industries. “The tech that we use isn't just used in aerospace but is applicable to other industries,” she said. “Making sure that our companies are financially very successful is the key for us in all of this.”
Jason McClain, senior director of ventures and innovation strategy at Boeing, explained that the company built AX with a serious intent to support global entrepreneurship. “We started the program in 2019 and invested in 10 companies and have done so annually since,” he said on the eve of the Dubai Airshow.
AX sees the show and the UAE as important. Funding for the program has come from Tawazun Council, the entity acting as the investment and procurement arm of the UAE defense ministry. AX said that it renewed the partnership for another year with matching funding.
“Tawazun has been supporting innovation since our early days, and running this program alongside Boeing will enable us to work closely with these amazing companies that are going to shape the future of aerospace,” Abdulla Al Awani, chief economic program officer at Tawazun Council, said this year.
AX portfolio companies have gone on to raise over £200 million ($244 million) on top of Boeing’s initial investment and have created more than 750 jobs in the UAE and beyond.
Like Tawazun, other global organizations have worked with participant companies as partners or mentors, including Etihad, GKN Aerospace, Rolls-Royce, KPMG, PWC, Frazer-Nash, Chevron Technology Ventures, and EasyJet, and they also have gotten involved in the selection process.
The program selected a fourth cohort in the first quarter of 2023, with Boeing announcing the selection of 11 startups on January 16.
Ten companies that graduated from the AX program are participating in the Vista 2023 startup hub at the Dubai Airshow, including Canada’s Basetwo AI, which exists to simplify highly regulated and complex engineering environments. Sharjah, UAE-based AR Engineering builds augmented reality solutions for aircraft maintenance and won selection based on the innovations it introduced for visualizing educational content with MRO technicians in mind.
“We specialize in animating and visualizing engineering manuals in augmented reality and 3D and we do it much faster than everybody else,” founder and CEO Akram Amir told AIN. He added that during the selection process, AX asked specific questions about how his solution could benefit the industry. “This was something that made us respect them even more—they understood our solution and found value in it,” he said.
Program alumni such as Inverness, UK-based Aiber, which provides mobile solutions to support crew during airborne medical incidents, and HiiROC, of Hull, UK, developer of a new thermal plasma electrolysis process for low-cost, zero-CO2-emission hydrogen production, were on hand at a symposium in Dubai on November 9 to underscore the success of the AX program.
Nabla Mobility in Tokyo, another AX poster child, helps airlines reduce fuel consumption using machine learning and AI to enhance flight plans with multi-factor flight optimizations.
AX’s Bates said the program is virtual rather than physically located. “When we did the program in person, the number of female founders that we had in the program was virtually none,” she said. “When we went fully virtual, we got a massive increase in the number of female founders applying and able to engage with the program."
To date, 25 percent of overall portfolio representation has come from female-founded teams, while 50 percent of 2023 investments went into start-ups led by women.
Directions taken by the Boeing ventures portfolio can vary. HorizonX, which invests in early-stage companies, spun off from Boeing in 2017. Autonomous eVTOL company Wisk is now a full Boeing subsidiary, while SkyGrid is a joint venture building aerospace integration solutions.
“It's a really broad portfolio,” McClain said. “Wisk is in California, SkyGrid’s in Austin; HorizonX invests across the globe. Aerospace Xelerated very intentionally invests outside of North America.”