Editor's note: In our 2024 Startups to Watch feature, the Silicon Valley Business Journal and San Francisco Business Times present startups and founders building groundbreaking products and companies in the Bay Area. Pyka is one of 17 we profiled this year — to read more about our mission and the other startups we're featuring, click here.
Pyka is attempting to bring aircraft into the automation age with its two models of fully autonomous electric propeller planes that are designed for spraying crops and delivering cargo. The Y Combinator-backed company is already in commercial production for its aircaft from its manufacturing base in Oakland.
About Pyka
- Founded: 2017
- Founders: CEO Michael Norcia, Chuma Ogunwole, Nathan White, Kyle Moore
- Headquarters: Oakland
- Employees: 62
- Total funding: $56 million
Fundraising with VCs has become a lot harder for startups in the past few years. When you go into those conversations, how are you selling Pyka?
Michael Norcia: We’re the only company in this space that is selling and leasing aircraft, and flying for revenue-producing customers. I think a lot of investors, especially at this point in time, really appreciate our strategy of getting to market quickly.
What’s been the most memorable moment since founding the company?
Norcia: The opportunity to go through YC, which was really fun. We spent a month designing the airplane and two months building it in my parents' backyard. We put it in a big box truck and drove seven hours into the Nevada desert, when Demo Day was a week away. So this thing had to work before Demo Day. We're camping in the back of the box truck. It's super windy and we're like, “Screw it. Let's do this.” And the airplane took off and it flies beautifully. By the end of that trip, we got awesome video of the airplane taking off on its own, flying around and landing on its own. That was really fun. We were working absurdly long hours, but the sky was the limit.
When we look at urban air mobility and where it's going in the short term, where does Pyka fit into all of that?
Norcia: A lot of the top [UAM] companies have phenomenally high burn rates. Even if they're sitting on a billion dollars in cash, they have structured themselves so that they'll burn through that in three years or so. Our burn rate is minuscule in comparison.
I think there's definitely a plausible scenario here that certification of these products take far longer, We may see our first FAA granted type certificate for an eVTOL [electric vertical take off and landing aircraft] in 2030. All that said, doom and gloom aside, the core concept of what those companies are working on, very much is the same vision Pyka has — electrifying and automating flight has a really compelling value proposition.
