Wingtra places second at the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award 2020

09.09.2020 20:31, Isabelle Mitchell

After ranking 4th and barely missing the podium in 2019, the Zurich-based drone startup took home second prize this year. Wingtra develops vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) mapping drones for surveying applications and was founded in 2019 by Maximilian Boosfeld (CEO), Basil Weibel (CTO), and Elias Kleinmann (CFO).

The Wingtra drone is a hybrid helicopter/plane. It takes off vertically – and then, when it reaches the right height, tips horizontally and continues to fly like a plane. Compared with a quadrocopter, this gives the unique and much faster aircraft an unusual range. Equipped with high-resolution cameras, the drone becomes a powerful surveying robot that is revolutionizing conventional technology.

This flying wonder provides images of incomparable quality and accuracy. “Even a small coin can be recognized with great clarity from a great height and located precisely down to the centimeter,” explains Elias Kleimann, the startup’s chief financial officer.
The drone’s greatest advantages – range and speed – come to the fore when measuring large areas, which it does much faster than traditional surveying methods on the ground. The Wingtra system comprises intelligent planning software so that any pilot can conveniently control the autonomous aircraft from the ground using a tablet. And lengthy flight training is not necessary: The user is certified after an hour-long introduction.

Sales of more than 1,000
The young company, like many drone startups, has its roots in the Autonomous Systems Lab at the Institute for Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich. CEO Maximilian Boosfeld and Chief Research Officer (CRO) Basil Weibel were already tinkering with flying robots while studying mechanical engineering. In 2016, they launched Wingtra AG as an ETH spin-off, together with Kleimann. A year later, they were able to sell the first series-produced drone; since then, they have sold more than 1,000. In the cheapest variant, the device costs about CHF 20,000. “It’s a price that even a small engineering firm can afford,” says Kleimann.

The drones are now in use in 71 countries on all continents: in mining, construction, research, agriculture, urban and spatial planning – wherever large areas have to be measured and evaluated according to certain criteria, such as soil moisture, pest infestation, or fertilizer requirements, WingtraOne offers the right solution. Mining companies use the flying robot to provide three-dimensional models of the mine site, environmental agencies in Australia and Africa use it to monitor the national parks and thus the wild animals, and researchers in Alaska use it to observe glacier melt – and thanks to a recently developed ‘corridor’ measurement app, the drone is also suitable for inspection of roads, railway lines, and pipelines.

Explore the full potential
The development team is constantly expanding the application range of the vertical takeoff aircraft, the data of which is compatible with most photogrammetry software. The startup has also made good progress in terms of commercialization, and Boosfeld and his team have set themselves ambitious goals: “We are striving for global market leadership in large-scale surveying.” The startup may still be some way from that, “but we are growing significantly faster than the market,” emphasizes the CEO. To finance the growth, Wingtra completed a series A financing round of CHF 10 million in May 2019, and in total, the startup has raised about CHF 20 million in venture capital. In addition, over the past year, a high single-digit million figure has come from sales. The money is used mainly to accelerate expansion and finance further development of the drone. “Together with our customers, we have improved our product by another class in the past 12 months,” says Kleimann.

A recent development means the drone can be upgraded with special propellers that allow an altitude of up to 5,000 meters, and now that it is equipped with a multispectrum camera and heat sensors, it has further expanded its uses in agriculture. At the moment, it is difficult to predict where the Zurich drone builders’ flight will ultimately end.


This article by Pirmin Schilliger was first published in the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Magazine 2020.