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Flying car startup Lilium raises $90mn in Series B funding

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CIOL Writers
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Lilium a flying jet company raises $90 million in fresh funding

Lilium Aviation, a German company that held a successful test flight of the Eagle, its two-seat electric jet, at its Munich base this year, announced that it has raised $90 million in a fresh round of funding. The funding was led by Tencent Holdings, the Chinese internet giant. Other investors included LGT,  the investment vehicle of Lichtenstein’s royal family; Atomico, the venture firm run by a founder of Skype, Niklas Zennstrom; and Obvious Ventures, the investment firm co-founded by the Twitter co-founder Evan Williams.

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“This investment is a tremendously important step for Lilium, as it enables us to make the five-seat jet a reality,” noted Lilium co-founder and CEO Daniel Wiegand. “This is the next stage in our rapid evolution from an idea to the production of a commercially successful aircraft that will revolutionize the way we travel in and around the world’s cities.”

The latest funding comes less than a year after Lilium raised $10 million in Series A funding from Atomico and with its latest cash injection, the company is determined to bring "low-cost air travel to the mass audience."

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Founded in 2014, Lilium aims for a world “in which everyone can fly anywhere, anytime” by building compact all-electric jets that take off and land vertically. This would effectively bypass expensive, space-consuming runways and would position the company to fulfill its mission of bringing Uber-style air taxis to market within a decade.

It is also working on a bigger, five seat version of an "air taxi" that could carry passengers as far as 300 kilometers or 186 miles and reach a maximum speed of 300 kilometers an hour.

Lilium is among several new-age startups looking to usher in an era of Jetsons-type flying cars, including those backed by the Google co-founder Larry Page, Uber and Airbus. But the two-year-old company is trying to stand out by focusing on an electric jet — unlike other models that effectively function more like hovercraft.

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