Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us during the Lithium Partners Fall 2025 Investor Conference. My name is Joe Diaz. I'm a managing partner at Lithium Partners. Today, Stuart Simpson, CEO of Vertical Aerospace Limited, will be taking us through the company's slide presentation. Vertical Aerospace Limited trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol EVTL. So let's get started. Stuart, welcome. I will turn the floor over to you for your presentation.
Joe, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to get a chance to present to you and your many viewers, so I will briefly introduce myself, what it is Vertical Aerospace are doing, and then run through why I think we are very well positioned in this space. And just to sort of pre-position that, in this industry, there's been a bit of a shakeout over the last few months, over the last 12 or 18 months, driven by physics and funding, driven by physics because your aircraft has to work and ours does, as you can see on the screen, and funding. There's been over $2.5 billion flown into this industry over the last 12- 15 months, so things are really starting to take place. There used to be 50 people trying to do this five years ago. There's now down to really a handful.
And within that handful, Vertical, I believe, is a clear winner. Yet we have a massive disconnect in our valuation versus some of our competitors. Why we are a clear winner and what sets us apart are a few things that I'll touch on. First of all, we are an aerospace company. We're not a Silicon Valley company. We are designing an aircraft. We know how to do it. We've certified over 30. It's the team. We've got the best aircraft in the sector. It's the safest. It's got the largest capacity. It's like being a limo versus a Mini or a Fiat 500. We've got the most powerful battery in the sector, and we've launched a hybrid version as well. We've told the market that'll be flying next year. We've also got the best business model. So I'll touch on all of those as we go through this.
But we have achieved the same level of flying. There's only one other company in the world. So we're one of only two companies in the world that have done what we've done. Yet we've spent well over $1 billion less than others. So I think we are uniquely, uniquely positioned to be successful. Now, with that, let me start going through the presentation. So my background, I've done 30 years in engineering-led businesses. I worked at Rolls-Royce and Bentley Motors. I worked at BMW, living in Munich. I then worked at General Motors all around the world. I then worked in the logistics and tech sector, leading two Fortune 100 companies. I met the founder of Vertical Aerospace two years before I joined it.
In that two years, I looked around the industry and I came to a conclusion driven by meetings with suppliers, customers, bankers, investors that Vertical is the real deal. It is an aerospace company designing an aircraft, and it will succeed in the space. Silicon Valley has certified zero aircraft. We, as a team, and you can see that team in front of me here, an incredible group of people have certified over 30 aircraft or powertrains. The key to aviation is understanding how to certify the aircraft. That is the best team, I believe, in the industry. We are uniquely positioned in this area to succeed. Now, in addition to the executive team that you can see there, we have got a phenomenal board. We have a Chairman, Dómhnal Slattery. Dómhnal has over 36 years' experience in the aviation industry.
He's created two of the three largest aircraft leasing companies in the world. He understands the market. He understands what airlines want and how they're going to use and deploy these. And we have deep connections into that reflected in our order book of over $6 billion of orders from companies like American Airlines, Japan Airlines, AirAsia, GOL. We have real, real expertise in this space. If you look on the bottom line, we also have some amazing people. Bottom left, we have Patrick Ky. Patrick was the general director, the Chief Executive of EASA, the European Regulatory Body for Certifying Aircraft. He did this for almost 13 years. Patrick has just joined our board. It's the equivalent of the FAA, the difference being Patrick was the head there, Chief Executive for 13 years. We also have Lord Andrew Parker.
Lord Andrew Parker was the former head of MI5 in the U.K.. He gives us deep connectivity into the defense sector in the U.K.. And then you can see Eamon Brennan. Eamon Brennan is also an advisor to the board. Eamon ran the airspace for Europe for many, many years. So we have a board that understands aviation better than anyone else in the industry. Now, just turning to why I believe Vertical is the premier eVTOL platform, and I'll touch on all of these as we go through it. Why I think we're going to succeed, and this presentation will be available, so you can read through this in more detail, but it touches on what I said before. Best aircraft, best business model. We are doing all the things to position us absolutely for success and for certification of this aircraft.
Now, one of the questions I often get asked is, what is the problem that we are solving with this type of aircraft? So it's actually very simple. There's about 500 million people moving into the megacities. These cities already struggle. You can't build out of them. There's not enough road space. You can't dig out of them. There's not enough space underground, and it takes forever to do. So everyone across the world is looking at the low altitude economy because at the minute, the skies are pretty much free. And that is the way you can solve this opportunity. And it isn't just me saying this. Morgan Stanley put out a report about three, four years ago saying that they expect the market in this low altitude economy to be about $40 trillion, sorry, $1 trillion in 2040. $1 trillion.
They recently updated that, and they've said they now expect it to be $9 trillion by 2050. So this is a real market. Now, it isn't there at the minute. It has to be created, but you can already see it happening around the world as the low altitude economy comes to life. Now, a good example of how you use these. Our main customers are likely to be airlines in the first instance. The first use cases, therefore, will be, and this will be a great example from JFK to Manhattan, and if you think you live in Manhattan and you want to do a flight, maybe only a 500-mile flight that takes a couple of hours, you will spend two hours going 6-7 mi to JFK. I actually did it twice this week. I've done it 4x in the last eight days.
In and out of Manhattan in a taxi, it's always between an hour and a half and two hours, and you're only going 6-7 mi , so there is a huge unlock in time value for people with this, and it isn't just New York. You can see some other examples there, but all across the world, there is a huge demand for unblocking in and out of urban environments, so with that, we aim to revolutionize mobility. One of the questions I also get asked as a follow-on is, well, why haven't helicopters solved this? And there's a couple of reasons. First one is environmental. The second is economics. If I touch on environmental first, for those of you who live in Manhattan, you'll know there is an ongoing battle over noise and safety. There was a terrible, terrible tragedy in Manhattan earlier this year.
Helicopters are extremely noisy. They're not as safe as they could be, and they're not clean. Our product is safe, silent, and has zero emissions. Safe, silent, with zero emissions. And the silence is what gives regulators in cities the ability to allow these to come in because it addresses the primary issue they have with them, which is the noise. Our product, you could stand 25 m away from it while it's hovering, and you can have a conversation without raising your voice. You don't hear it beyond the background hum in a city. So it is perfectly suited to an urban environment. Now, turning to economics. What if our customers, Bristow, the largest vertical takeoff and landing operator in the world? They operate more helicopters than anyone else in the world. They are clear that this will disrupt roughly 70%-80% of the products in their portfolio.
The reason for that is helicopters. The basic design is 40-60 years old, highly stressed mechanical system. Within that mechanical system, there are 60-70 single points of failure. That means, on average, over the course of a year, for a single-engine helicopter, for every one hour of flying, you lose it to two hours of maintenance to check that it's safe. For the VX4, for our product, for one hour of flying, there is one minute of maintenance. You go from an asset that's deployable 30% of the time to one that's deployable all of the time. It's a huge economic lever for people that want to fly this. When I've taken people before this, someone said back to me, this is like a SpaceX moment. No one ever believed anyone would disrupt NASA.
But actually, if you come at this with a different hypothesis and a different frame of reference, you can absolutely disrupt it, which is what we're doing here. Just to touch on why there is a premium rideshare at the right-hand column, we've modeled out over 1,200 routes with our customers, over 1,200 looking at the mobile phone data, density of people moving around. We don't even have to stress our model to get to a cost per seat per km of between $2 and $2.50, which is bang on with a premium rideshare. So this already has a cost point equivalent to premium rideshare. Now, what people charge for it, we're not going to operate it. We're going to sell the aircraft. Other people will operate it.
But the cost is already at a mass transport level, which is why I genuinely believe this is the first step to highways in the sky. Now, turning on to why the market is at a tipping point. I mentioned at the start there's been a bit of a shakeout over the last few months driven by physics and funding. The physics is clear. Our aircraft works. You can see it on the picture behind me. Many, many competitors have fallen away. The second thing is funding. Over the past year, Vertical Aerospace restructured its balance sheet, took off $130 million of debt from it. That was equitized, and we've raised $160 million in funding. We sit here with cash to take us through to the middle of next year. We are in a great, great position, and we are one of the winners that is emerging.
Now, along with that shakeout that leaves four or five successful companies, one of which is us, there is also regulatory evolution. So five years ago, people did not know how regulation was going to work for these products. What we have now is that is coming through very quickly. In the USA, President Trump issued an executive order instructing the FAA to make sure the skies are open for these. Japan and Korea are already way ahead with this. And in the U.K., in one of my former jobs, I did the first commercial drone flight and drone delivery in the U.K. Took about 18 months' worth of negotiating with the U.K. government, but we did it, and it was an incredible moment for the industry. As part of that and taking it to the next step, I'm part of the U.K. government's Future of Flight Industry Group.
The government have put $30 million behind it this year just to get us working with them on how they unlock the skies safely. They've been very public that the skies will be ready to go in 2028, which is when our product comes to market. Regulation is evolving all around the world, but in particular, I would say in the U.K., in Europe, and Southeast Asia. Now, if we touch on to infrastructure, the other thing people question is, okay, how is infrastructure? How is that going to work? Where do they take off and land? We know that there's already 350-360 vertiports contracted to come on stream towards 2028, in addition to opening up heliports all around the world. This thing is coming together like never before.
Certainly, versus where it was even two years ago, everything is in place for this industry to become real over the next couple of years. Now, within that, why is Vertical well positioned to succeed? The first point here is extremely important. We have the highest level of safety in the industry. No one else is getting close to this. We are the only people in the world certifying to a one in a billion chance of failure. Now, to bring that to life, what that actually means is that our aircraft has the same level of safety as when you get on a large passenger jet, any Airbus. It is that level of safety, a one in a billion chance of failure.
And actually, what it means is our aircraft can have one or two of those types of failures on a mission, and it has to be safe enough to continue flying and complete the mission. An incredibly important point. The rest of the industry is certifying, or American competitors are certifying to a lower standard. That standard does not mean the mission is completed. It means if there's a failure point, something happens, the aircraft has to be able to glide down. That gives you an element of safety, but it's not the same as being safe enough to complete the mission. So that definitively sets us apart. No one else is doing this. And we know the industry better than anyone. That's where we focus. Our whole company has been based on working with customers. And as I say, we've got over $6 billion of orders.
Our customers are telling us, we want this to be as safe as flying on our commercial jets, which is what we're providing. The next thing that sets us apart, we are certifying under the Civil Aviation Authority in the U.K. and EASA in Europe, and that links to the safety. That's the safety standard they are mandating. Next, we have scalability. What I mean by that is if you look at the picture of the aircraft, wingtip to wingtip, all the products in the sector are broadly the same, but we have designed a larger tube underneath. So we are the only one in the industry that can start with four passengers and scale to six because we've designed it to be able to be scalable. Same size. You just take out big business class seats and put in economy class seats.
Importantly, when people are flying on these, you generally have baggage. We are the only one in the industry that has an aircraft that will take luggage. Four people plus 70 lbs of luggage each. No one else gets close. The rest of the competitors basically carry on a small, soft carry-on handbag. So we are, again, positioned perfectly for what the customer wants, both our customers as the airlines and the end customers using the product. We have leading battery technology in the sector. We have announced a hybrid aircraft. The hybrid aircraft takes our current battery aircraft. It installs a hybrid powertrain within the same airframe. We don't have to redesign it. It takes the range from 100- 1,000 mi, and it takes the payload from 550 kg to 1,150 kg. It's a phenomenal, phenomenal achievement. And you can see at the bottom there, OEM business model.
As I said before, we are one of only two companies in the world that have achieved the level of flying that we have. Yet we have a huge disconnect in our valuation. I genuinely think we are well positioned. Now, just turning to certification. Certification is the key here. With no certification, you have no business. You have to be able to bring the product to market by a regulator that is recognized globally so your customers can get insurance. That means there's effectively two, EASA, who we're working with, or the FAA. The difference is between those, first of all, we're at a higher safety standard, but second, we have a shared responsibility for the regulator. Every time we fly this aircraft, the regulator has a joint liability with me, the CEO, for that aircraft.
That means that the level of scrutiny we're having is way above and beyond anything that our competitors are doing. They're flying under what's called an experimental category with effectively no regulatory oversight. Everything I do, the regulator shares in the learning with us and derisks the type certification, and what you can see on the right-hand side is a graph. We are doing a huge amount of regulatory work upfront, which eases our path to certification. An incredibly important point to note. Now, turning to the next page, we have, as I've said already, the highest safety standard in the world. The key to this is once we certify with EASA and the CAA in the U.K., it opens up all of Europe immediately, 600 million people. So that's a huge market on its own.
But because it is the gold standard globally, it means it opens up the world in very short order. You can passport the aircraft into the other regions of the world because you've certified it to the highest standard in the world. So again, we believe that puts us in the best position. Now, turning to the flying that we've done. This product is designed to take off like a helicopter, accelerate like a helicopter, fly on the wing like an aircraft, decelerate and land like a helicopter. As you can see on here, we have done nearly all of that, one of only two companies in the world to have done these three phases. The final phase, phase IV, is when we put all of this together.
We've already taken off like a helicopter, accelerated like a helicopter, we've landed like a helicopter, we've taken off like an aircraft, we've flown like an aircraft. We have a final 20 seconds to do, and it really is only 20 seconds, where we accelerate from around 30 knots, where we're flying as a helicopter. The rotors on the front of the wing tilt forward, and we fly like an aircraft on the wing. We've done hundreds of miles flying like that as an aircraft. You then slow down, the rotors tilt back, and you land like a helicopter. We'll be doing that in Q4 this year. At that point, we will remain one of only two companies in the world to have done it, but we'll have done it to a higher standard than anyone else because when I do this, I'm doing it with detailed regulatory oversight.
The regulator is key because that is who certifies the aircraft. When we do this in Q4 this year, it is a major technological and certification de-risk for the aircraft. It means the technology is proven, the concept of the aircraft works, and there is a clear route to certification with our regulator. It's an extremely exciting few months coming up for us at Vertical. Now, just turning to the next page, why the aircraft is so good. We've scaled our airframe, as I said at the start. We will launch it with four business class seats. We'll then move to six economy class seats. You can also see, you can take the seats out. You can use it for cargo, defense, emergency services. Ultimately, and this is on our technology roadmap, autonomous. It's actually very easy to do autonomous in this.
We have our whole flight control software from Honeywell. You just plug in an autonomous function to it, so really well positioned for growth in the future. Now, turning to one of the things that sets us apart is our battery. As I've said, we have the largest airframe, so we can take more people and more luggage. We knew that from day one. Because of that, we designed the biggest, most powerful battery in the sector. For those of you who like your cars, it has the torque of 27 Cadillac Escalades, yet the whole aircraft weighs the same as just one. It's a remarkable feat of engineering. We've done all of this ourselves at our own facility in the U.K.. We buy little cells, round about the size of a finger. We package 12,000 of those together. We do the thermal control of it.
We do the power control software. We do the crash capability of it. We have a certification-ready battery. We know, and we've in fact passed all the tests that we've done up to this point. In fact, we've passed them so well, we're already thinking of ways we can save mass because we've done such an amazing job on this. So we are extraordinarily proud. And one of the key things here is every airframe we sell will have a life of 20+ years. Now, every year of its life, it has to buy at least one battery from us. There is no other option. So this creates a wonderful business model because every aircraft has to buy batteries.
It's a bit like being both Boeing or Airbus selling the aircraft and making a lot of money and being GE Aerospace, where they sell the powertrain and make a lot of money. We have both of those bits in one company. We make money on the aircraft, and we make money servicing the powertrain year after year after year. So an extremely exciting moment or an extremely exciting business case. Now, turning to the hybrid, I've mentioned this before. Just after I joined, I signed off an investment in a hybrid powertrain. This is a powertrain that extends the range to 1,000 mi. 1,000 mi. And really importantly, it opens up dual use, so military applications. As you can imagine, the military are extremely interested in this type of product. Silent takeoff and landing in electric mode, low noise signature, low heat signature, very stealthy.
Once you're up and flying, you can turn on the gas turbine. That'll give you a range of 1,000 mi where you land again silently, so we put this out into the market. We flew into Riyadh, the world's largest military airshow, and there you can see our aircraft flying in front of thousands of people, and it was the star of the world's biggest military airshow. The amount of buzz and energy this created was fantastic. We knew it would. We absolutely knew it would because this is an aircraft that the military are so excited about because of its capabilities. Now, just turning to our business model very quickly. We have three business models. We have the electric aircraft. We have the batteries that you have to buy every year, and we have the hybrid, so three diversified revenue streams.
How we bring the product to market, we are a pure play OEM. If we just flip the slide, we can see on one side of the page, we work with tier one aerospace companies to bring the product to market. That de-risks the route to certification because they know how to bring it to market, as do we because we are an aerospace company. On the right-hand side, you can see some of our customers. We are working with some of the most impressive airlines in the world, and we're doing this spending 75% less than our competitors. So just a quick look at the footprint of our customers. You can see this is round about a third Americas, a third Europe, a third Asia. So we've got a great global footprint that ties back to what I said.
We are certified to the highest standard in the world. That means we can sell globally. No one else in the world is doing this. Now, we also have some industry-leading commercial partnerships. If we just look at this, American Airlines, we've been working with them for over five years. We're incredibly close to American Airlines. Bristow, the world's largest helicopter operator. Again, we've been working with them for nearly five years. We've just announced a partnership, a turnkey solution for our airlines where we supply the aircraft, Bristow supplies the knowledge to run it, and the companies such as American, Japan, etc., would do the branding and use the customer, so we know how to bring this to life, a bit like the regional airline models you know in North America, and then you can see on the side Honeywell.
We signed a $1 billion deal, a $1 billion deal to work with Honeywell to finalize the flight control software and everything the pilot sees, feels and touches in the aircraft and to provide that through, well into the next decade. Again, we are working with the best in the business. Now, just starting to wrap up, I relaunched the business last year, about 12 months ago, with FlightPath 2030. We were the only company to put out clear financial and operating metrics with a clear roadmap to certification when we did this last year. One of the analysts that covers us wrote that this was like having an adult in the room. Just last week, we did a capital market day. That is a fantastic opportunity to see how we've updated that. You can see some of our board members, some great commentators talking about us.
But we have a conservative business model that we know we can hit. And importantly, we'll be generating $100 million free cash flow in 2030. So just wrapping up, I think Vertical is absolutely extremely well positioned to succeed in this industry. We are leading the way in safety. We have the best aircraft with an industry-leading capability in cabin size, in battery, in luggage capacity. We have a business model that is letting us do all of this spending 75% less than our competitors. Yet we have a disconnect on our valuation to our American-based customers that is, certainly from my perspective, utterly unjustified. So with that, I think we are extremely well placed to be successful over the coming years. And Joe, if I hand it back to you.
Stuart, thank you for that compelling presentation. Lots of great opportunities ahead for the company, and we appreciate your taking some time to share that with us. Also, thanks to everyone watching. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a meeting with Vertical Aerospace, send an email to 1x1@lithumpartners.com. That's 1x1@lithumpartners.com. If you'd like to learn more about Lithium Partners, you can visit our website at lithumpartners.com or follow us on LinkedIn to stay connected about future events. We hope you all enjoy the rest of the conference and have a great day. Stuart, again, thank you very much for your time.