Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are honoring startups across the region's innovation space. Here's the honoree in the gaming category.
The founders of Alef Aeronautics Inc. have a particular fondness for “Back to the Future.” The 1985 cinematic classic fueled their desire to change the way people get around.
CEO Jim Dukhovny and his team — Constantine Kisly, Oleg Petrov and Pavel Markin — wanted to bring the movie’s flying DeLorean to life.
“I drew on a napkin the idea and asked Constantine, Pavel and Oleg how long will it take to build? They said six months. ... Here we are seven years later,” said Dukhovny, who like BTTF’s Doc Brown has what some would consider an unconventional hairdo, a knack for tinkering and a willingness to take risks to achieve his goal. “But their engineering genius is what turned that napkin into a real driving and flying car.”
The Santa Clara-based startup, which launched in 2015, has a working version of its Model A, the first vehicle designed to both fly and drive on ordinary roads. Earlier this month, the company announced that it had secured a testing permit from the Federal Aviation Administration.
This is the first vehicle of its type to gain the FAA’s testing approval. It’s the same size and shape as a regular car, but it also has something no regular auto has — a system of rotors under its mesh-like skin designed to propel the Model A in the air and allow it take off and land vertically.
Alef Aeronautics unveils 'flying car'
Dukhovny, a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Clara University, said leaving big tech was a blessing for him despite a startup’s long, unpredictable days. “I feel more comfortable in a creative, innovative startup than working for Microsoft, Yahoo, SAP. It’s more natural,” he said, name checking three of his past employers.
Like Dukhovny, Alef’s other co-founders also worked for larger technology companies. Kisly spent time at Prism Skylabs and Intel Labs; Petrov, Alef’s tech lead, was a software engineer at Cisco Systems Inc.; and Markin was an engineering technician at Intel Corp.
When Alef came out of stealth and unveiled the car at Draper University last October, Dukhovny said there was a bit of a hiccup: The car was unable to fit through the door, until a team of people turned the vehicle on its side.
“After everything was agreed on, we realized there is a small problem. Our car is 7 feet wide and the doors of Draper University are 6 feet wide,” he said. “Our genius founders built a car rotisserie, and then 20 people rotated a huge car like a chicken and on 5-inch dresser wheels rolled it through the door while afraid to breathe.”
Though Alef has made strides toward commercialization, Dukhovny said he wished it would have unveiled the electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) vehicle earlier, when other market competitors announced their products. According to Emergen Research, the flying car market is expected to be nearly $1.4 billion come 2030.
Though the founding team thought it would initially take six months to build the eVTOL, they had three issues to address. They’ve accomplished two: The Model A had to resemble a car and it had to be able to take off vertically. The third issue is that “it has to be affordable for most people,” Dukhovny said.
The Alef Model A is priced at $300,000 — a price far outside the buying power of most people. Consumers can pre-order one for $150 to get in the general queue, or spend $1,500 to be in the priority group. The company’s goal is to deliver the first version in 2025.
So far, the company has raised nearly $14 million, a modest amount compared with others developing flying vehicles, such as like San Jose-based air taxi company Archer Aviation, which raised more than $1 billion before going public. But that was before the company’s FAA approval gained Alef national media exposure.
Alef is also looking at ways to achieve production levels of traditional automotive manufacturers, though has no plans to partner with car manufacturers.
About Alef Aeronautics Inc
- Location: Santa Clara
- Industries: Aviation, eVTOL
- Founders: Jim Dukhovny, Constantine Kisly, Oleg Petrov, Pavel Markin
- Founded: 2015
- Funding: $13.92M
- Major investors: Santa Clara Ventures, Space X, Impact Venture Capital, Draper Associates
- Why they were chosen: Although there are other companies developing eVTOLs and some claim them to be flying cars, Alef’s is the only one that truly resembles a car. The company has been able to acquire a flight-testing permit from the FAA and is backed by investors like Tim Draper.
