MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (Diya TV) – Google co-founder Larry Page has added another startup to his arsenal, Zee.Aero hopes to develop and commercialize personal flying cars.
Page has reported taken on funding of the company, and has requested his involvement in the project be guarded with the highest level of security, according to a report from Bloomberg.
“Page has personally funded Zee.Aero since its launch in 2010 while demanding that his involvement stays hidden from the public, according to 10 people with intimate knowledge of the company,” the report said.
Zee.Aero currently has just 150 employees, and uses an airport hangar in Hollister for test runs of the prototype. The use of rolling ladders and mobile platforms may help in the development of these prototypes as they will allow for maintenance and work on the vehicles to be conducted more efficiently – click to read more about how such hardware can help in hangars and warehouse environments. Additionally, the company has been conducting research and running tests at the NASA Ames Research Center Campus in Mountain View. Page has invested more than $100 million in the startup, according to the Bloomberg report.
Page has also financed an additional flying car startup, named Kitty Hawk, which is developing a product to compete with Zee.Aero. Sebastian Thrun, who spearheaded Google’s self-driving car program and founded Google X, is part of the Kitty Hawk program. Around the globe there are currently about a dozen or so different companies trying to develop flying cars, the companies backed by Page are considered to be industry leaders.
“Over the past five years, there have been these tremendous advances in the under-lying technology. What appears in the next 5 to 10 years will be incredible,” Mark Moore, a former advanced aircraft designer at NASA told Bloomberg.
The development of flying cars is older than much of the technology we use now in our daily lives – in 1945, an engineer named Alexander Weygers had received a patent for a “discopter,” a vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) machine. Fifty years ago, Paul Moller, a professor emeritus at the University of California at Davis, had tested a prototype aircraft that could be parked in a garage. In 2009, Moore, a researcher at NASA had published a paper on a concept plane named Puffin that used electric motors.
During the same year, a group of engineers including JoeBen Bevirt, Ilan Kroo, and Larry Page had held meetings in Silicon Valley to develop electric planes. Pake ultimately separated himself from the group to begin the development of Zee.Aero, with Bevirt founding a competing company named Joby Aviation at the same time.
