Wingcopter 198 at Lilongwe

Wingcopter, founded in 2017 in Darmstadt, Germany by Tom Pluemmer, Jonathan Hesselbarth, and Ansgar Kadura, makes the Wingcopter 198, a fixed-wing tilt-rotor electric vertical-takeoff delivery drone aimed at medical and logistics delivery in Africa and other remote regions. It carries up to five kilograms across up to three drop sites, ranges up to seventy-five kilometers at up to 150 kilometers per hour, and lets one operator monitor as many as ten aircraft, on roughly 110 million dollars of total funding including a 40-million-euro European Investment Bank investment in 2023 and a Series B closed in June 2025.

The registry records it at pilot, leaning early-commercial, maturity: it holds beyond-visual-line-of-sight permissions in Germany and other European regions and ran real BVLOS medical deliveries in Malawi, but at humanitarian-project scale, while its flagship plan to deploy twelve thousand drones across forty-nine African countries is a multi-year target rather than realized volume, its revenue is very low at an aggregator-estimated 1.73 million dollars in 2024, and its US, Brazil, and Japan type certifications are in progress rather than granted, with no FAA BVLOS authorization. A correction worth recording: the storyline of a German delivery-drone startup struggling financially into insolvency belongs to Volocopter, which filed for insolvency in December 2024, not to Wingcopter, whose risk signal is thin revenue and repeated capital raises rather than a filed insolvency.