Good day everyone, and thank you for joining us today for the Lytham Partners Spring 2026 Investor Conference. My name is Joe Dorame, Managing Partner at Lytham Partners. I would like to welcome Vertical Aerospace, which trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker EVTL. Today, Samuel Emden, Head of Investor Affairs, will be taking us through the company presentation. Let's get started. Sam, welcome.
Thanks, Joe. Much appreciated, and thanks for having us. As Joe said, Vertical Aerospace listed on the New York Stock Exchange, ticker EVTL. What we do is two things, we are designing and selling an electric aircraft, and we are designing and selling the battery that is the propulsion or the power to that aircraft. Just sort of Vertical short disclaimer slide, what we are at a glance. We're based in the U.K. We are the only European eVTOL company. We have a very large order book, and this takes in an overview of us and Valo, V-A-L-O, which is our go-to-market aircraft. We intend to go to market and certify this aircraft and begin commercial operations towards the end of 2028, beginning of 2029. What is Valo? This is a photo of the model of the aircraft. This isn't a rendering.
I'm just going to take you through why this is an exceptional aircraft. If you have looked at electric aircraft and particularly electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, and the reason I'm being specific about that is because it's about the vertical takeoff and landing that is critical to this. You can see that there are a bunch of propellers in this photo. There are four at the front and four at the back. This aircraft takes off like a helicopter, but then it has a fixed wing like an airplane. It transitions to taking off like a helicopter, transitioning to flying like an airplane, so on the wing, and then back to a helicopter again, which means it can, I'm saying this tentatively, but take off and land anywhere, primarily existing and then electrified helipads.
What's exceptional about this aircraft, particularly in comparison to some of our peers, is sort of what's on this slide here. The airframe, which is the body of the aircraft, what sits under the wing, is much larger than any of our competitor aircraft. What that enables us to do is a number of things. One is have a segregated passenger cabin to pilot cockpit. There is a bulwark or pilot safety point here. You can't touch the pilot when the aircraft is in flight. We have the pilot cockpit, passenger cabin, and luggage hold. One of the key use cases for these aircraft will be airport shuttle. You get off at JFK. I'm in New York probably monthly at the moment, but I'm based in London, and it takes two hours, often longer, to get from JFK into the city.
That's a route that could take 15 minutes. Existing helicopter operators often don't let you take your luggage with you, which for me is baffling and sort of negates some of the convenience of getting there quickly. In our aircraft, each passenger, and there is one pilot and four passengers, can take 70 pounds of luggage on this journey. Fundamentally, whilst I've sort of said we take off like a helicopter, which is true, this is in fact, we are certifying this, and that is the sort of the north star, if you will, certification to the same level of safety as Boeing and Airbus aircraft. No one else in the sector is doing that. Everyone else is doing it sort of somewhere in between airline levels of safety and helicopters. We're going for airline levels of safety. That's not our decision.
That's what Europe decided. I'll come onto that in a moment. This is going to be an overview of sort of cross-section of the aircraft, as I said, pilot cockpit, passenger cabin, luggage hold. When I said we had the largest airframe or fuselage under the wing, what that enables is the four people, two opposite two, it's fairly spacious. There's plenty of space to work. Here's where you charge your phone. Here's a speaker to play your music and interface with the pilot. It's so wide that actually it can accommodate three opposite three. Now, that's not the case with today's current battery technology, but we see the energy density in cells increasing year- on- year. This is something where an aircraft that will go into service in 2029 will become upgradable over time once battery technology gets better.
What we've made sure for our customers is that we're selling them an aircraft where over the course of time, they can accommodate one pilot, four passengers, then five, then six, and as this slide testifies, double their profitability because you're flying the same sort of fixed fees around pilot cost, landing fees, et cetera, but you can accommodate more passengers. What's sort of critical about this aircraft too is whilst this is predominantly a civil passenger aircraft, Valo is, there are other opportunities, particularly around emergency medevac, as top left suggests, and cargo, as top right suggests. Then there is a dual use aspect of this. As I said, civilian passenger or commercial passenger aircraft, but it has the ability, because of the size, both for autonomy, which we're baking in with our flight control partner Honeywell, and also hybridization.
This is a fully electric aircraft, this version, that's 100-mi range, pure play battery, zero operating emissions. This slide shows where a gas turbine would fit, that takes the hybridized version to a significantly longer distance, I'll touch on that in a sec. There's particular defense plays for this, which I'll touch on in a moment. These are some of our partners we're working with for the aircraft. We don't think we can do everything ourselves. What we think we can do is design, produce these aircraft, and design the best possible battery to power it. These are the best partners in the industry that we're standing on their shoulders and their decades of experience in aerospace to deliver Valo to our customers in the market. Aciturri is a great airframe provider in Spain.
Honeywell will be a name you know well, and then various others, Dassault in France, et cetera. Let me just take you on to hybrid very briefly, but this slide shows the pure play electric, 100 mi, hybrid, 1,000 mi. The payload doesn't exactly double, but almost. The new world order we live in now, defense spending 3% of GDP is supposed to be what NATO countries are spending. Huge opportunity, as I said before, that we are the only European player here, so we're having deep and regular discussions with European and ally military around what Valo could be in a defense application. This shows sort of how far it could go from England to Italy, could go all the way to Poland, in Eastern Europe, and shows what the hybrid opportunity could be. We've been flying our final prototype aircraft.
It has a twin, identical twin. That twin prototype will be retrofitted with a gas turbine and be hybridized by the end of this year. We'll be flying pure play electric and hybrid over the next sort of 12 months. What is certification? I talked about it. You can't fly passengers, you can't insure an aircraft without certification. Europe defines this as SC-VTOL, Special Condition Vertical Take-Off and Landing. They issued it in 2019. You can go and double-click on it now on EASA, which is European Union Aviation Safety Agency's website, and download it. They updated it in 2021. It's very clear, it's transparent. This is what you need to do to certify electric anything in Europe. Europe already has a good track record. EASA has certified an electric aircraft before and an electric engine. Tecnam Pipistrel and a Safran electric engine.
It knows what it's doing. The way I describe this often to an American audience is it's a bit like an American football, an NFL play. You run the play, you hope you get a touchdown. There is a clear engineering work stack, there is a clear certification work stack we need to go through. We run that play, we reach type certification. On our board, we have Patrick Ky, who ran EASA between 2013 and 2023 and was the person that signed off SC-VTOL. We couldn't be in a better position to reach certification towards the end of 2028. Where we are now in our flight test, I mentioned the prototype. This is our prototype. Here are images of it flying in the Cotswolds, which is just outside London. We've achieved all of the flight phases. In fact, there is no new flying our aircraft needs to do.
The technology is proven as of 2026. You can see here when we achieved it, tethered just off the ground, which if any of you have ever been in a helicopter before, you know that just getting off the ground is when it's the most rocky. We are rock solid. We have four propellers at the front, four propellers at the back. We're able to manage the aerodynamics of that. We're rock steady just off the ground. Transition is the marriage of those two things, taking off like a helicopter, transitioning on the wing and back again. We're one of only two companies, tiltrotor eVTOLs, that have done this. Another, Joby, did it in spring 2025, a year before us.
One of the things that you'll see about us is we are woefully undervalued in comparison to what the market understands about eVTOLs and for the level of progress and the level of spend that we're delivering. It's quite remarkable. This is where we're at in terms of flight test. This is what between sort of now and 2028, 2029, we are building, this is what Valo will be. These are our prototype aircraft. We're building seven Valo end of this year, beginning of next year, through next year, flying them to deliver certification towards the end of 2028. Key catalyst that's coming up next is sort of middle of this year, called CDR or Critical Design Review. That's when Valo, our go-to-market aircraft, we no longer design it anymore. That's locked in. Why is that critical?
It means our supply chain to the left of the screen, the Honeywells, the Aciturris, et cetera, of this world, they are fully contracted. They're baked in 10+year contracts. Our customers, all those on the right, some of the great airlines of this world, like Japan Airlines, American Airlines, Bristow, the world's largest helicopter operator. Our customer order book is split a third, a third, a third, North and South America, Europe and the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. They know what they're getting. They know the performance spec of the aircraft that we're going to deliver to them, that's why CDR is so critical. I'm just going to touch finally on our battery, for me, it's incredibly important, perhaps undersold part of our story.
Valo is what we're delivering with those partners I showed you before, the Honeywells, the Aciturris, the Evolitos, the Hanwhas of this world. We went to market about five, six years ago and said, "Well, we'll just buy a battery off the shelf." No one's ever done battery as primary propulsion in aerospace before. Batteries are slowly creeping into aerospace, but not as propulsion. There was nothing off the shelf we could buy in a similar way to some of the other sort of products we're building in to be part of our aircraft. We're doing it ourselves. We have what we believe is one of the most advanced aerospace battery facilities in the world, to the west of London, near Wales. Every year we have to replace the battery. This slide testifies it better. Why do we need to do it every year?
It goes back to SC-VTOL and EASA. EASA said for primary propulsion in aerospace, a battery can only be degraded to 92%. Then we can use that for second life applications. For us, that gives real commercial opportunity because it means we sell it to our customers, a new 100% great battery. We take the 92% degraded one back. Approximately 20 year life of this aircraft, that's 20 batteries. Great gross margins on this. It's a sort of brief overview on our battery. Then a couple of things I want to touch on that have happened in 2026. One is we sort of tried to solve the capital raising story. We've raised a sort of headline figure of GBP 850, GBP 80 million has been accessed, various flexible but committed facilities, both from our primary shareholder, Mudrick Capital, and another key financial backer.
This really means that we could, if we chose to draw down on it, be fully funded to certification in 2028, 2029. Finally, what have we done else this year? We've achieved piloted transition. This has been the key unlock. As I said, only one other company has achieved it. Doing it was an enormous milestone. It means the technology is proven. We've been taking Valo, the aircraft I showed you, around the U.S., as well as London. We've added customers, we've added suppliers, and it's been a sort of year full of momentum and excitement as we sort of move into, over sort of a couple of months' time, to the Farnborough International Airshow, which is the preeminent air show in 2026. It only happens every other year, alternating with Paris.
If you happen to be the third week of July in the U.K., we would welcome you to come and see us fly at the Farnborough Airshow. Come and meet us there, sit in Valo and see what a great opportunity this is to take people around, change how we travel, and do it in a way that is silent and with zero emissions. With that, I'll hand back over to Joe, and thank you for the opportunity.
That's great. Thank you, Samuel, and thanks to everyone for watching. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a meeting with Vertical Aerospace, send me an email at dorame@lythampartners.com. Thank you and have a great day.