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Joby Acquires Xwing Autonomy Division, Looks Ahead to Autonomous Flight
Joby Acquires Xwing Autonomy Division, Looks Ahead to Autonomous Flight
6/19/20241 min read


Joby Aviation, Inc. (NYSE:JOBY), a company developing electric air taxis for commercial passenger service, today announced the acquisition of the autonomy division of Xwing Inc., an industry leader in the development of autonomous technology for aviation.
Founded in 2016, Xwing has been flying autonomous aircraft since 2020, using the Superpilot software it has developed in-house. Superpilot enables safe, uncrewed operations, supervised from the ground, and is the world’s first fully autonomous gate-to-gate flight technology. With 250 fully autonomous flights and more than 500 auto-landings completed to date, Xwing became the first company to receive an official project designation for the certification of a large unmanned aerial system (UAS) from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in April 2023 and the first to receive an Air Force Military Flight Release in 2024.
The acquisition brings Joby to the forefront of aviation autonomy and complements the Company’s 2021 acquisition of Inras GmbH, a company developing lightweight, high-performance radar sensor technology. Xwing’s comprehensive approach, and expertise in perception technology, system integration and certification, is expected to benefit both near-term piloted operations for Joby as well as fully autonomous operations in the future. The Company also expects the technology to play an important role in accelerating the execution of existing contract deliverables with the U.S. Department of Defense and expanding the potential for future contracts.
JoeBen Bevirt, Founder and CEO, said: "The aircraft we are certifying will have a fully-qualified pilot on board, but we recognize that a future generation of autonomous aircraft will play an important part in unlocking our vision of making clean and affordable aerial mobility as accessible as possible.
"The exceptionally talented Xwing team has not only made unparalleled progress on the development and certification of vision systems, sensor fusion and decision-making autonomous technologies, but they’ve also successfully demonstrated the real-life application of their technology, flying hundreds of fully autonomous flights in the national airspace. We’re honored to bring them onboard at Joby as we continue on our mission of building a next generation aviation company."