In 2013 a small company from the town of Bruchsal asked ordinary people for half a million euros. It got the money in two hours and 35 minutes, a European crowdfunding record at the time.
The company was e-volo, which later became Volocopter. Its founders, Stephan Wolf and Alexander Zosel, had started it in 2011 with a strange idea: a multicopter big enough to carry a person, powered by many small electric rotors instead of a single large one. On 21 October 2011 the first prototype, the VC1, flew. Many people in aviation thought it was a toy. The crowd at Seedmatch disagreed, and its confidence bought the company time.
A passenger aircraft needs certification, and an electric air taxi has no road map.
That money mattered because aircraft are expensive and slow to certify. The company needed years, test pilots, regulators and a manufacturer. In 2017 a larger investment of about 25 million euros arrived. In 2019 Geely led a 55 million dollar round. That year Volocopter flew a demonstration over Singapore's Marina Bay, with a temporary vertiport built for the show. In 2022 it raised 170 million dollars to launch air taxi services, and in 2023 it flew in Rome and New York.
Flying was not the hard part. Paper was. A passenger aircraft needs certification, and an electric air taxi has no road map. Plans to carry athletes at the Paris 2024 Olympics were dropped because the engine was not certified. The Singapore launch was put on hold indefinitely in November 2023 because the company lacked local funding partners.
The cost of waiting for approval is that cash keeps burning. On 30 December 2024, Volocopter filed for insolvency because it could not keep its funding going. The firm kept operating during the proceedings.
In March 2025 a rescue came from China: Diamond Aircraft, owned by Wanfeng, took over the company. It stays in Bruchsal. Passenger flights were pushed to 2026, and the latest report says the VoloXPro should be certified in Germany as a light sport aircraft by the end of 2026.
Founders can read two things in this. The crowd was right that people wanted to see the thing fly. The cheque that matters, though, is the one that carries you across the years between prototype and permit, and nobody can crowdfund that.