Airbus
Canvas Category OEM : Aerospace
Airbus is a leader in designing, manufacturing and delivering aerospace products, services and solutions to customers on a worldwide scale. With over 130,000 employees and as the largest aeronautics and space company in Europe and a worldwide leader, Airbus is at the forefront of the aviation industry. We build the most innovative commercial aircraft and consistently capture about half of all commercial airliner orders. Thanks to our deep understanding of changing market needs, customer focus and technological innovation, we offer products that connect people and places via air and space.
Recent Posts
Mapped: An Interactive Journey of the Airbus A320 Supply Chain
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Explore an interactive map of the Airbus A320 supply chain facilities and transport methods. Siemens enters the metaverse. New techniques for recycling plastics.
Assembly Line
ZeroAvia announces completion of $116m Series C funding round
ZeroAvia today announced that it has completed its Series C funding round at a total of $116m. The UK Infrastructure Bank joins the round as a cornerstone-level investor alongside co-leads Airbus, Barclays Sustainable Impact Capital and NEOM Investment Fund (NIF) as announced in September, with the Series C round set to accelerate the company’s journey to certification of its first engines and advance R&D that will scale the clean propulsion technology for larger aircraft.
Titomic wins aerospace 3D spray printing repair and coating contract
Additive manufacturer Titomic has won an order from aircraft maker Airbus Group to supply cold spray additive manufacturing, repairs and maintenance equipment. The cold spray additive manufacturing process – also known as cold spray 3D printing – will allow Airbus to fabricate freestanding parts or to build features on to existing aircraft components, The $645,000 contract sees cold spray systems for unique coatings and repairs installed on Airbus’ sites, while another system will be installed at Titomic’s European facility.
Novelis signs an agreement to extend collaboration with Airbus
Novelis, a leading sustainable aluminum solutions provider and world leader in aluminum rolling and recycling, announced today that it has renewed its contract with Airbus. The contract extends a successful, cooperative relationship spanning more than 30 years. Novelis will supply Airbus with plates and sheets, as well as wingskins especially for the A320 aircraft family. Wingskins are particularly demanding products that require pre-machining for long components and special alloys to accommodate the most demanding aircraft industry standards.
Airbus Ventures Announces New Investment in Impulse Space
Airbus Ventures proudly announces its investment in Impulse Space, Inc. – a leader in the development of in-space transportation services for the inner solar system – which has raised $45 million in its oversubscribed Series A funding round. The round is led by RTX Ventures, with participation from Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Airbus Ventures, Space Capital, and others.
Impulse Space will advance its work in upcoming missions, such as LEO Express-1, a GEO refueling mission and upcoming mission to Mars. This funding will support several development efforts with a focus on Helios – Impulse’s largest vehicle yet. The Helios kick stage enables direct-to Geostationary Equatorial Orbit missions, bypassing the need for a Geostationary Transfer Orbit.
🦾 Retail robotics startup Telexistence raises $170M
Telexistence Inc., a startup developing artificial intelligence-powered robots for the retail sector, today announced that it has raised $170 million in funding. One of the investors in the Series B round was SoftBank Group Corp. Last month, SoftBank signaled that it plans to step up the pace of its AI investments following a year of limited venture capital activity. The company scaled back its participation in startup funding rounds last year to address market headwinds. Besides SoftBank, Telexistence’s latest raise also included the participation of several other backers. Among them were Airbus Ventures, Monoful Partners, KDDI Open Innovation and Globis Capital Partners.
In FamilyMart stores, the shelves that hold packaged goods are often embedded into the walls. Behind each shelf is a corridor accessible only to employees and a merchandise storage area. When a certain product runs out, employees enter the corridor, pick up new merchandise from the storage area and place it on the shelf. Telexistence’s TX SCARA robot automates the task. It’s a mobile robot arm designed to operate in the employee-only corridor between a store shelf and the merchandise storage area. The TX SCARA can detect when a product is out of stock, pick up new merchandise from the storage area and place it on the relevant part of the shelf.
Airbus and STMicroelectronics collaborate on power electronics for aircraft electrification
Airbus, a global pioneer in the aerospace industry, and STMicroelectronics (NYSE:STM), a global semiconductor leader serving customers across the spectrum of electronics applications, have signed an agreement to cooperate on power electronics Research & Development to support more efficient and lighter power electronics, essential for future hybrid-powered aircraft and full-electric urban air vehicles.
The collaboration builds on evaluations already conducted by both companies to explore the benefits of wide bandgap semiconductor materials for aircraft electrification. Wide bandgap semiconductors like Silicon Carbide (SiC) and Gallium Nitride (GaN) have superior electrical properties compared with traditional semiconductors like silicon. They enable the development of smaller, lighter and more efficient high-performance electronic devices and systems, particularly in applications requiring high power, high frequency, or high-temperature operations.
🚀 Venus Aerospace Adds Airbus Ventures to Investor Team
Venus Aerospace, a Houston-based hypersonic startup enabling cost-effective one-hour global transport, welcomes the new addition of Airbus Ventures to its team of investors.
In Spring 2022, the company raised its $20M Series A, led by Prime Movers Lab, to fund engine development and subscale initial flight testing for building its Mach 9 hypersonic drone and Mach 9 spacecraft, both capable of one-hour global travel.
Airbus Ventures Leads Solestial’s Oversubscribed $10M Seed Round
Airbus Ventures announces its newest lead investment in Solestial, Inc. (“Solestial”), the solar energy company for space. The round was joined by AEI HorizonX, GPVC, Stellar Ventures, Industrious Ventures, and others. This new funding will be used to ramp up production and customer engagement capabilities, as the company expands ground and flight testing in parallel; additional investments in R&D and go-to-market functions are also planned.
Solestial’s solar panels can be produced at scale using automated production methods at 90 percent lower cost than solar panels widely used by the satellite industry. This best-in-class silicon photovoltaic technology, optimized for space, also delivers orbital reliability of at least 10 years in low Earth orbit (LEO). Economical solar panels with scalable manufacturing capability are critical to meeting the demand of the satellite industry, which is projected to grow from 5,000 operational satellites to 100,000 or more by 2030, a 40% CAGR.
Flight of the navigator – the Airbus quest to build, run its own multi-market 5G network
Airbus’ decision to go it alone, separately from traditional telco operators, is down to security, which remains the north star for digital change in just about every Industry 4.0 scenario. “The data has to be stored on our campus without external connectivity. That is one of the main reasons for selecting private networks.” The only data flowing out of is network data, for network control; all the industrial data remains locked into the edge networks.
But back to the use cases, which are the things on Castagnino’s mind, actually. Private cellular is being used already in Toulouse and Hamburg for site surveillance, flight-to-ground data offloads (“95 percent of the volume”), quality inspections, automated guided vehicles (AGVs), collaborative robotics, digital twins “the shop floor with digital mockup”, private mobile radio (PMR), and asset tracking (“Supply Chain 4.0”, including via international roaming).
CesiumAstro Secures $60 Million In Oversubscribed Series B Funding
CesiumAstro Inc. (“Cesium” or “Company”), a developer of advanced aerospace communication systems, today announced it has secured $60 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round, co-led by Airbus Ventures and Forever Ventures, with strategic participation from L3Harris Technologies (NYSE: LHX). Returning investors include Kleiner Perkins, Lavrock Ventures, Franklin Templeton Blackhorse Fund, and HEICO (NYSE: HEI).
Aerospace, Defense and Industry 4.0
“Designing for manufacturability, modeling the production environment, and then producing our products with a minimum of duplicated effort—this can give us the breakthroughs in speed and affordability that the A&D environment needs in a time of limited budgets and rapidly changing threats,” explains Daughters. “These technologies are an essential component to our ‘digital thread’ across the product life cycle. They give us the ability to simulate tradeoffs between capability, manufacturability, complexity, materials and cost before transitioning to the physical world.”
“In a nutshell, I4.0 involves leveraging technology to better serve the world,” says Matt Medley, industry director for A&D manufacturing at IFS, a multinational enterprise software company. “More than just collecting and processing mounds of data via sensors and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), I4.0 is turning data into actionable intelligence to not only drive efficiency and grow profits, but to also help companies be good stewards of our natural resources and local communities. Aerospace and defense companies whose enterprise software can keep pace with developments like additive manufacturing, AI, digital twins, and virtual and augmented reality (V/AR) are the ones that will thrive in an increasingly digital 4.0 era.”
How Paint Robots Reduce Rework
There are few wild beasts more fearsome and concerning to the everyday finishing engineer than the dread three R’s: Rework, Rejections and RMAs.
In finishing, particularly when it comes to spray processes, achieving the kind of consistency and quality customers expect requires a high degree of both reliability and precision. Experienced painters and operators – or elaborate automation systems – can be engineered to provide high output, but over time many parts will seep through the cracks and simply not get the attention they require.
Automating Carbon-Fiber Composite Fuselage Assembly
“During the last 10 years, increased commercial aircraft production rates have led to more interest in automating assembly processes,” Brieskorn points out. “To reduce process times and cost, automation is becoming more appealing to engineers.
“However, the main challenge is that large aircraft parts come with relatively high geometry deviations, so robots need sensor guidance,” says Brieskorn. “Strict requirements and tight tolerances in the final structures are also challenging for standard automation systems.”
The Journey of Additive Manufacturing and Artificial Intelligence
Airbus leads major €8m investment in energy harvesting chip designer
This funding round was led by existing investors Airbus Ventures and French venture capital fund Partech, with KBC Focus Fund, W.IN.G, Noshaq Ventures, LeanSquare, Nivelinvest and Vives also contributing and brings the total investment to $13.2m.
The company sees tens of billions of connected IoT and edge computing devices starting to be deployed and activity will keep on ramping up in the decades ahead. Reliance on disposable batteries in this context is simply impractical, with heavy network maintenance costs being incurred (as depleted batteries will need replacing periodically), along with huge damage to the environment.