On a cool morning last November, 800 people gathered before sunrise in a South Burlington hangar to witness the maiden flight of Beta Technologies’ first electric aircraft to be built on its new scaled production line.
Kyle Clark, Beta’s enigmatic founder and CEO, piloted the Alia CX300 — one of the startup’s two aircraft models — in a flight that lasted over an hour. As he climbed through clear skies in a “perfectly quiet electric airplane,” he says he felt grateful.
“There’s not a piece in that airplane that we didn’t design, build, assemble, test,” Clark told TechCrunch. “I got to sit in a chair in the sky, flying west by myself at 7,000 feet in a system that wasn’t even conceived a few years ago, and that’s a pretty special thing to be able to do.”
For Clark, a successful launch was crucial, in part so he could honor his commitment to the company’s board. Clark has a simple rule at Beta: Keep your promises.
“We set a goal of November 13, and on the morning of November 13, we went and flew that airplane,” Clark told TechCrunch. “Keeping that promise meant so much to our board because the next promises we make, they’ll trust us to keep.”
Clark is something of an anomaly within the burgeoning electric aviation industry — starting with his decision to headquarter Beta in his hometown state of Vermont and not Silicon Valley, where his rivals reside. His unconventional aesthetic permeates the company he founded, including the design of its two electric aircraft and a go-to market strategy that includes an EV aircraft charging business.
The Harvard-educated, former professional hockey player, and pilot instructor has also rejected venture capital.
“My entire career…has been in power electronics controls,” Clark said. “Every single day, I fly two or three different airplanes. I taught my daughter to fly before she knew how to drive. We at Beta have a very different culture and type of business here than all these West Coast folks who stumbled onto a train that was already moving.”
Despite flying more under the radar than competitors Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation, the startup has continued to rack up hours in piloted flight, as well as financially backed customer orders.
Beta’s three-tiered plan
Beta’s go-to-market strategy is different from its competitors. Archer and Joby are producing electric vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, called evTOLs, to sell to customers and operate themselves in air taxi networks. Archer is also pursuing a program of record with the Department of Defense in partnership with Anduril.
Beta wants to be the OEM in the equation; it’s focused on building both a conventional electric aircraft called the Alia CX300 eCTOL, which Clark flew in November, and an evTOL dubbed the Alia A250 eVTOL. The aircraft are identical in everything but the propulsion and propellers, which Beta argues will help it save on production costs and streamline certification.
Clark says building two types of aircraft also allows Beta to tap a wider customer base. ECTOLs are well-suited for regional flight, whereas eVTOLs are better for urban environments. Going to market with an eCTOL also gives Beta a nearer-term path to commercialization. The company hopes its Alia CX300 will be the first eCTOL certified for commercial flight this year or by 2026. Clark reckons FAA certification for the A250 will follow about 12 to 18 months after that.
An even nearer-term path to revenue generation, though, is Beta’s electric aviation charging network, of which Archer is currently a customer, despite their competition in the skies. The startup has 46 charging sites online today across 22 states and New Zealand, with 23 more in development and plans to get up to 150 operational in 2025.
Beta’s electric plans
Beta plans to begin operations in 2025 with one of its first customers, Air New Zealand. The airline has committed to four CX300s, with the option to buy 20 more, and will use them to deliver mail for the NZ Post. Beta also counts United Therapeutics, UPS, and the U.S. Airforce as customers for a range of use cases, including medical, logistics and military, and recently received orders for passenger-carrying aircraft from Blade and Helijet.
But the competition is stiff. Archer’s new focus is on defense, and the startup this month raised an additional $300 million in funding, on top of the $430 million it raised in December. That brings Archer’s total funding up to $3.36 billion. Joby has locked in strategic backers like Delta and Uber, and last year raised another $500 million from Toyota, plus $222 million more from underwriters, bringing its total funding up to $2.82 billion. Both Archer and Joby’s early funding rounds came from VC.
Beta has raised $1.15 billion from institutional investors, but Clark says the startup’s “fundamental efficiency” has maximized impact.
In February, Beta hit a critical milestone when its pilots flew the CX300 on its first airport-to-airport mission between four regional airports in New York, stopping to charge at infrastructure Beta had set up along the way.
Beta has also done multiple piloted hover and transition tests with its eVTOL model, the Alia A250. Archer has only flown its eVTOL remotely. Joby began piloted tests in October 2023.
“We’re a relatively private company that has quietly tucked ourselves up here in Vermont and gone way further, both metaphorically and physically, than anybody else in this industry on the things that really matter, which is flying aircraft, charging aircraft, and building an industrial complex to produce those things,” Clark said, noting that Beta’s Vermont facility will be able to produce 300 aircraft at peak.
“We have a fully online production facility right now. Nobody else has that.”
From NHL to power electronics
Clark’s “whole world [has been] reliable power systems architecture” since long before he founded Beta in 2017, whether it be through his role teaching power electronics engineering at the University of Vermont or his previous induction power supply company.
Clark is also a pilot and a flight instructor who has built and flown “at least 20 airplanes.” His LinkedIn displays some of his earliest jobs, like being a bouncer at a Boston bar who “wrestled drunks up stairs after Red Sox games.”
Oh, and Clark briefly played hockey for the NHL after studying material sciences at Harvard.
This is all to say, Clark is both a nerd and a jock, and he carries himself with the humility of a blue-collar engineer.
We last spoke on the day Clark presented Air New Zealand with its first CX300, and despite the occasion, he dressed in a well-worn black hoodie, jeans, and a camo baseball cap with BETA written in bright orange letters. When prompted, he proudly showed me the tattoo on his arm that his son had designed, which the two inked onto his body using a robotic arm they built for fun.
Perhaps it’s that sort of tinkerer mindset that led Clark to design the power systems architecture in Beta’s aircraft differently than his competitors.
Both Archer and Joby place separate batteries near the electric motors powering their propellers – Archer has 12 propellers, Joby has six. The idea is to distribute power so that if a battery pack or a part of the propulsion system fails, the aircraft can continue flying.
Beta instead places all five batteries together in a pack underneath the seats. A “singular ring bus” provides an electrical connection where every motor gets access to every battery. If there’s a singular failure, it gets isolated from two sides of the failure, according to Clark.
“A reliable power system is not a fully distributed system because any permutation of failure that happens precludes the utilization of energy that’s stored elsewhere,” he said.
Clark says it’s important for leaders building safety critical power systems to have technical experience. Designing and flying airplanes isn’t like building and testing software, he said.
“You don’t get two shots and say, ‘I’ll crank it up till it breaks and back off it a little,’” Clark said. “You bury an airplane in the side of a mountain, you’re done.”
Beta’s funding strategy
The $1.15 billion Beta raised has come from institutional investors like Fidelity and Qatar Investment Authority. The startup has not accepted any venture capital, Clark was adamant to point out.
“We skipped over the VC because we had a customer out of the gates, and it was United Therapeutics,” Clark said.
Clark said his rejection of VC came from something United’s CEO Martine Rothblatt taught him called “regret assist game theory.”
“Fast forward some period of time and define what you don’t want to happen,” he said. “What would you regret the most? And then you set your priority to preclude that from happening.”
Clark’s biggest regret would be for his business to run out of money, followed closely behind his fear of losing steerage of the ship, which could prevent Beta from achieving its mission.
“Equity dilution versus equity control are two very different things,” he said. “Somebody can have an equitable return on their securities without having control in the business.”
Clark says each aircraft build is cash-neutral since Beta only accepts financially backed orders that pay for the parts and labor. That has led Beta to hit positive contribution margins, though Clark says he expects net profitability to be “greater than 12 months away.”
Investor funds have largely gone towards building out manufacturing facilities and certifying aircraft, which Clark says demonstrates respect for investor capital because investors want to see their money go to growth, not to operations.
It’s why Beta put investor dollars towards its $170 million bespoke factory, Clark said.
“The only way we can build aircraft that are going to be profitable on the unit economics, and long-term extremely low cost, is to engineer a system that builds the product. The process is the product,” Clark said. “It’s not as sexy or as interesting as flying a beautiful quiet airplane, but it’s almost more important.”
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