H3 Dynamics Holdings, a Singapore-based innovative aerial mobility firm, has closed a US $26 million Series B investment round headed by Japan’s SPARX Mirai Creation Fund (backed by Toyota Motor and SMBC).
The financing also included Singapore’s EDBI, ACA investors, Capital Management Group, the Grosvenor Group, Audacy Ventures, Ascent Hydrogen Fund, and ATEQ, a French strategic investor.
“Our investors recognise that this is a long journey and that we must first address our immediate markets while solving key technical and regulatory challenges before adding more complexity,” said H3 Dynamics founder and CEO Taras Wankewycz.
H3 Dynamics was founded by Wankewycz in 2015 with the goal of decarbonizing the planet. The company focuses on hydrogen propulsion, aerial systems automation, and software service sales. In three development phases — drones, cargo, and people — it hopes to build a scalable road to low-carbon hydrogen-powered flying.
Initially, the firm focused on developing a self-charging infrastructure for battery drones, as well as a variety of maintenance and monitoring services. The same infrastructure was later used to support far longer-range unmanned devices that could fly for hours utilising hydrogen technology. This gave the firm new options in terms of autonomous, zero-emission freight.
A three-phase plan is in place at H3 Dynamics. Its first phase focuses on providing drone-assisted autonomous inspection and incident response solutions. It has developed and commercialised a proprietary, all-digital inspection and rectification automation programme, with applications in smart-city applications such as high-rise façade maintenance being the first. It began three years ago in Singapore and has since grown to encompass a wide range of businesses and geographies.
A sophisticated autonomous drone nesting station is also being released by the drone venture. With permanent set-ups on roofs or remote industrial locations, these cloud-connected vertiports for industrial drones may transfer data over 5G and become visible in real-time in the national sky.
It has teamed up with Thales Group, a global leader in air traffic management, to develop an autonomous urban air transportation infrastructure, starting with small camera drones and progressing to bigger, unmanned freight drones. The next stage will be to allow cargo flights of up to 400 kilometres or perhaps 800 kilometres.
The firm will extend its first-phase income sources in the second phase to ensure an optimal route to profit. It will expand on this first success by introducing longer-range hydrogen-powered aircraft capable of carrying increasing amounts of weight in the mid-mile, beyond visual line of sight package and freight operations sector.
H3 Dynamics intends to transition from unmanned freight to manned hydrogen aircraft, which will include passengers, in its ultimate phase.
David Wu, President at Ascent Hydrogen Fund, commented: “Air mobility is one of the hardest yet most important industries to decarbonise. H3 Dynamics is ideally placed to overcome this challenge. It is already generating revenue with a clear path to profit using a scalable SaaS model while benefiting from two decades of ultra-light hydrogen fuel cell system development.”
In Austin, Texas, where it presently manufactures and delivers full hydrogen drones, integrated aerial fuel cell propulsion, and refuelling units, the firm plans to grow its technical and sales staff. I’ll also employ for its Toulouse, France, business, where it builds bigger hydrogen systems, works on hydrogen aircraft integration, and conducts test flights.
The winner of e27’s Echelon Asia Summit 2019 was H3 Dynamics.
