Larry Page has been missing from Google for a couple now almost a decade, but he remains omnipresent all the while. After forming Alphabet, the holding company for Google and all the moonshots it had been taking, Page and his co-founder at Google, Sergey Brin even left their official day to day management roles at the holding company making Sunder Pichai in charge of everything. While they do have a controlling stake still, they have been pursuing other interests quite ravenously. In the case of Page, it has been Kitty Hawk which is an Air Taxi startup. And Kitty Hawk is now making some moves in the M&A space - it has acquired 3D Robotics, a company that was once dubbed as a rival to DJI, the Chinese company which is known for making drones.
A profile of the startup which has been mostly operating in stealth emerged which reveals that it has been working on developing remote piloted vehicles. These vehicles interestingly will be electric in nature and Kitty Hawk is exploring vertical landing and takeoff. Another interesting tidbit from the story is that 3D Robotics which counted former Wired Magazine editor as its co-founder and CEO will be joining Kitty Hawk as its COO reporting to CEO Sebastian Thurn who was also the founder of Google X and helped build Udacity. Sebastian Thurn was the man who kick-started the self-driving car project at Google before the division was called Google X.
Kitty Hawk Flying Car
For a very short while, 3D Robotics had carved out a niche for itself by competing against DJI and Parrot, but today it is clear that DJI won out that race. Now this acquisition will mean, that the expertise 3D Robotics accumulated in miniaturising drones will be poured into Air Taxis. 3D Robotics had a consumer product called Solo that even imbibed some autonomous capability was discontinued.
"The path from drones to remotely-piloted passenger aircraft is becoming increasingly clear, especially from an FAA [certification] basis," Anderson tweeted Friday. "The two share many similar technologies, from power systems to autopilots, so it will be interesting to see where scaled-up drones & scaled-down traditional aviation meet," he added.
undefinedSome personal/professional news: I'll be joining @kittyhawkcorp (Larry Page & Sebastian Thrun's eVTOL company) as COO as part of a 3DR acquisition. The path from drones to remotely-piloted passenger aircraft is becoming increasingly clear, especially from a FAA cert basis...
— Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) June 11, 2021
Page founded Kitty Hawk in 2015 after folding Google under Alphabet, but he kept it away from Google. The company came out of stealth in 2017 when a personal electric aircraft called the Flyer emerged. It worked and evolved the Flyer concept and then in 2018 revealed the Cora that was handed off to a joint venture with Boeing. But in the recent time, it had abandoned the Flyer and laid off some employees - though it pivoted to a third aircraft. This one is called Heaviside and is more traditional in looks when compared to the aircraft's being developed by some of the other startups. Currently, the team at Kitty Hawk is working on making it fully autonomous.
