Daniel Wiegand has been flying gliders since he was 14. That is the line that shows up in one profile of the Lilium co-founder, and it explains a lot. Before he was an aircraft entrepreneur he was a teenager who knew exactly what it felt like to hang in the air with no engine at all.
He went on to study aerospace engineering at the Technical University of Munich. One profile says the idea for a flying taxi arrived on a semester abroad in Glasgow, after he found a YouTube video of the American V-22 Osprey. It is the kind of origin story founders tell, and it may have grown in the telling. What is documented is that in 2015 he, Sebastian Born, Patrick Nathen and Matthias Meiner, all engineers or doctoral students at TUM, started Lilium. The name is a nod to Otto Lilienthal, the German glider pioneer.
A jet with dozens of electric fans in the wings, quiet enough for cities, fast enough for regional trips, built in Bavaria.
The early support was unglamorous. The European Space Agency's Bavarian incubation centre gave them a start. Then the money got serious. In September 2017 a round of more than $90 million came in, with Atomico, Tencent, LGT and Frank Thelen's Freigeist all involved. A few months earlier, in April 2017, a two-seat unmanned Lilium Eagle had flown at a small airfield near Munich. In May 2019 the five-seat Phoenix followed.
The pitch was irresistible. A jet with dozens of electric fans in the wings, quiet enough for cities, fast enough for regional trips, built in Bavaria. In March 2020 more than $240 million arrived, bringing total investment above $375 million. In September 2021 the company merged with the SPAC Qell and began trading on Nasdaq at a value of about $2.4 billion, though it had no meaningful revenue and a 2020 loss of €188 million.
The price of that ambition showed up slowly. Wiegand was replaced as CEO in 2022, when Klaus Roewe took over. Certification of a new kind of aircraft is long and expensive, and the cash kept leaving. In October 2024 the two operating subsidiaries filed for insolvency, and Nasdaq delisted the company on 7 November. A rescue seemed to arrive in December, when an investor group led by Mobile Uplift agreed to take over the business and keep around 775 jobs. The promised money, more than €200 million, never came. In late February 2025 Lilium filed for insolvency again, ending operations for over 700 people.
The founder lesson is a hard one. A prototype that flies proves physics. It does not prove a business. Wiegand built the first and could not afford the second, and the glider pilot's gift, patience in thin air, runs out when the funding does.