Scoop: Arrival’s eVTOL spinout quietly folds
+ New EV registration data, Spending Review, and His Majesty’s EVs
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We don’t often cover electric aircraft, though today’s scoop is about the only surviving part of the collapsed UK unicorn Arrival.
Elsewhere… Tesla registrations fall as BYD catches up to Ford, planning rules are changing for EV chargers, and lots of hub openings (yay!).
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Arrival’s electric jet venture ‘SkyBridge’ goes bust 🚁
Headline… I can reveal that SkyBridge, a British eVTOL company set-up by the former EV unicorn Arrival, quietly went bust two weeks ago, with administrators being appointed on 19 May. Full story below…
Background: Over a year ago, in February 2024, the British EV start-up Arrival, which was once valued at £9 billion, went into administration after running out of money. It was not a quick death, and many tales of woe poured out about the company over its final six months. These included stories of a prototype van being built by hand - not by its promised automated robots - and during a demonstration to UPS, a van set on fire. According to the FT, their executives even considered an office in Mauritius, for no other reason than it’d be a nice place to work from. I wrote a lengthy feature on the company’s rise and fall here.
During all these leaks… One thing we learned was that, within Arrival, a special project was developing an ‘electric jet’. Known officially as ‘Arrival Jet’, the project seems to have existed for almost as long as Arrival’s doomed van. The project was set up to research, develop, and design autonomous passenger and freight drones. It was allocated a significant sum of Arrival’s R&D budget. According to one employee, more than £50+ million went into developing their eVTOL - which stands for ‘electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft’ - with a big emphasis on the vehicle being able to deliver cargo, rather than necessarily people.
As Arrival went south in August 2023… ‘Arrival Jet Ltd’ was jettisoned (..ha-ha) into a fresh brand away from the Arrival project under the new name ‘SkyBridge U.K. Ltd’. Denis Sverdlov, the Russian businessman who gained billionaire status (and lost it) through Arrival, was very enthusiastic for his eVTOL project. As he sought to hide away during Arrival’s downfall, leadership and ownership of Skybridge went to his Russian confidante, Maksim Pavilainen, through a management buyout.
Denis and Maksim have known each other for a long time. Both attended the Saint Petersburg State University of Engineering and Economics, albeit I believe Maksim was there after Denis. Though they seem to have become close when Maksim joined a VC firm (Kinetik) of which Denis was a significant owner and director. The firm initially owned 100% of the shares in Arrival. After Denis founded Arrival, Maksim became his Chief Product Officer and led the ‘Jet’ work.
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