Hybrid-electric Aircraft Developer Maeve Goes Bankrupt

Hybrid-electric aircraft developer Maeve Aerospace has gone bankrupt, ending the European start-up’s five-year effort to bring a low-emissions regional airliner to market. A court in the Netherlands declared Maeve and its parent company, Green Transition Alliance, bankrupt on May 28, according to the Dutch insolvency register.

Founded in 2021, Maeve operated from offices in Delft, the Netherlands, and at Oberpfaffenhofen Airport near Munich, Germany. Dutch business newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad reported in mid-May that Maeve had failed to raise the €20 million ($23 million) it was seeking to fund the next stage of development. Co-founder and CEO Jan Willem Heinen confirmed to the newspaper at the time that Maeve would cease operating in its current form, saying prospective backers had come to view the next investment round as too risky. The company employed 24 people.

Maeve’s collapse comes despite a roster of airline and industrial partners assembled over the past two years. SkyWest signed a strategic agreement in September 2025 to invest in Maeve, securing exclusive launch customer rights. Delta Air Lines announced a partnership two days later, calling itself “Maeve’s North American global airline partner.” Japan Airlines and subsidiary JAL Engineering signed a memorandum of understanding with Maeve at the Paris Air Show in June 2025, agreeing to collaborate on aircraft design, operations, and a customer support framework for the Maeve Jet program.

On the industrial side, Maeve announced a propulsion technology collaboration with Pratt & Whitney Canada at the Farnborough International Airshow in 2024 and an engineering advisory partnership that November with MHI RJ Aviation Group, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries subsidiary that acquired the CRJ program from Bombardier and supports the regional jet’s in-service fleet.

The Maeve Jet was the final iteration of a concept that changed repeatedly over the company’s brief life. The single-aisle design would seat 76 to 100 passengers, depending on configuration, with a range of 1,450 nm in its 76-seat layout and 950 nm with 90 seats. Its twin aft-mounted hybrid-electric open-rotor engines were designed to cut fuel consumption and emissions by up to 40% compared with today’s regional aircraft, according to the company.

Maeve unveiled the all-electric, 44-seat Maeve 01, with a projected range of 250 nm, in April 2023, then abandoned that design eight months later in favor of the larger hybrid-electric M80, an 80-seater with twin wing-mounted powerplants and a planned range of 800 nm. Last year, the company redesigned the aircraft once more—moving the engines to the rear of the fuselage and stretching capacity—and rebranded it as the Maeve Jet. Targeted service entry slipped accordingly, from 2029 to no earlier than 2032.

The company’s €20 million shortfall was a fraction of what the program required; Heinen told AIN in 2023 that bringing its aircraft to production could cost around €2 billion. Like others in the sector, the company had already retreated from battery-only propulsion after concluding that it could not deliver the payload and range airlines demanded. The Maeve Jet’s closest analog, Heart Aerospace’s 30-seat hybrid-electric ES-30, remains in development after a similar pivot, while Delft start-up Elysian is still pursuing a 90-seat all-electric airliner.

Some of Maeve’s design talent has resurfaced at MHIRJ, whose out-of-production CRJs the Maeve Jet was designed, in part, to replace. Chief technology officer Martin Nüsseler, the former Airbus and Deutsche Aircraft senior engineer who led Maeve’s design work, announced on LinkedIn on June 1 that he has joined MHIRJ as v-p of aircraft and new program development. At least six other former Maeve employees have followed, according to their LinkedIn profiles, including senior v-p of program and industrialization Peter Spyrka, lead aircraft designer Eduardo Sepulveda, and engineers specializing in flight physics and airframe design.

“Bringing together top talent from Munich and Montreal to form a high-performing, integrated team is a privilege, and I look forward to shaping the next generation of aircraft and air systems,” Nüsseler wrote on LinkedIn.

MHIRJ has been without an aircraft program of its own since Mitsubishi Heavy Industries canceled the SpaceJet in 2023, and it has marketed its engineering services to outside developers—including Maeve—in the years since. In 2021, the company partnered with ZeroAvia on a technical study of retrofitting the CRJ700 with hydrogen-electric propulsion. The new Munich design office gives MHIRJ a clean-sheet design team at a moment when Japan’s government is laying the groundwork for a next-generation airliner targeting service entry around 2035.