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XTI Aerospace has all but abandoned its plans to bring the TriFan 600 ducted-fan VTOL aircraft to market. After more than a decade of research and development work on the six-passenger business aircraft, the company has shelved the TriFan program and shifted its focus toward drones.
Speaking with investors during a town hall in early February, XTI chairman and CEO Scott Pomeroy confirmed that the TriFan 600—the company’s flagship product—has been defunded and deprioritized amid “a strategic evaluation of the business.”
“It is effectively being put on a diet, a significant cost diet…while we go through that evaluation process,” Pomeroy said. In the meantime, XTI intends to retain and preserve all intellectual property related to the TriFan 600 program.
XTI’s decision to pause work on the TriFan 600 came shortly after it acquired Drone Nerds and Anzu Robotics in November, following a broader restructuring that included divesting the Inpixon software business after the 2023 merger that took XTI public. Launched in 2013, the TriFan program has yet to build or flight-test a full-scale prototype, making little progress in the company's ambitions to offer an alternative to existing business jets and helicopters.
The TriFan program review “is really about ensuring we can find a way to align the development of that business with the appropriate capital structure that it has,” Pomeroy explained. “So, we'll look at a number of different alternatives with the business, and when we're comfortable and confident as to what the direction is, we'll have more to say about that.”
Pomeroy suggested that XTI’s new drone business could provide the revenue stream the company needs to proceed with the TriFan program at some point in the future. “To the extent we're successful with drones, we create a strong revenue stream and a profitability stream to look at other opportunities within the portfolio,” he said. “That's what we're focused on, is looking to be able to fund some of these opportunities out of our current operations without having to go to the market for working capital.”