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…d more capital. And then we started building. and now we're building towards the plane. If you're a founder listening to this, the learning that you should have is every time you need more capital, it needs to be something material. >> Yeah. >> Ideally something physical you can touch. >> Yeah. >> That you can show that you made. Their first big airline customer actually came out of the spam folder. >> United Airlines came through an inbound email through our info email. Clara was looking at it and she was like, "I think this might be a thing." Like he was like cleaning out the spam and that led us like through the front door. We just brought them over, showed showed them the electric motor we built that was the size of the jet engines we tried to replace and they kind of immediately got it. >> And the design itself? Most electric aircraft startups try to look futuristic. Heart did the opposite on purpose. >> It looks very much like the turbo props we're trying to replace. We're not trying to build a sports car. I'd rather build something that looks very conventional but is kind of hiding its Superman cape under the hood. >> This is the first one. >> Yeah. >> We never even tested this one because we just realized that it wouldn't hold. And the new one just goes all the way through to the bottom here and it's like this big thing. So it's like really sturdy. >> This is the pilot plant. Most of this plane is designed and built right here. >> This is a cylinder body for the actuator. 6061 aerospace aluminum. There's about 15 machine components in the actuator that we're working on developing in-house processes for. >> In traditional aerospace [music] >> this would be a sub-supplier and you just source it and you you get it in a year to get one. And now you can just play around with it and test it. This is the same basic architecture for aileron, rudder, landing gear extension, braking, even the pitch of the propellers. >> If you want to build something in-house, you should start with the things that you're don't have to go to one supplier but you go to like eight different. Like so that it it's scales with the number of technologies rather than the number of suppliers. >> The whole plant is wired like one giant test bench. >> You can deconstruct it like a Picasso painting. And here's the cockpit, here's the cabin, here's the tail. And all of this is being fed, uh you know, 1.6 megawatts of power to could keep the aircraft in the air from just everything that's happening here. We're going to be testing fault injection, so >> everything from like putting in programming error to cutting a wire, everything's got to work even if everything goes wrong. >> Like [music] the first time you get in a Model 3 and you're like, "It's just one screen." I think that's a lot of the idea here. As the guy that designed this, he worked on the Dragon space capsule. You can fit [music] up to 36 passengers. >> Yep. >> But most common probably going to be 30 passengers, which means everybody's going to get like 6 in of extra legroom. >> And the heart of the operation is the battery lab where the team is [music] choosing to sell for the next aircraft. e 30 passengers, which means everybody's going to get like 6 in of extra legroom. >> And the heart of the operation is the battery lab where the team is [music] choosing to sell for the next aircraft. >> This is the battery cell lab where we are trying to determine what our cell is going to be. We have lots of different cells which are on display here um from Chinese, American, and Korean manufacturers. We can determine which one's going to have, you know, the most flight cycles, best safety, cost, and energy density. >> [music] >> We talked about Elon coming to MIT 12 years ago and talked about like 400 watt-hour per kilogram batteries. Do we have any cells that are like 400 watt-hour per kilogram? >> The highest thing that we have on this table right now is about 370. One of the manufacturers is producing something at that 400 level um that we're expecting to have within the next couple months. It easily meets our targets for the first generation of the aircraft. >> So, you got the countdown timer there. 23 days. Inspired by YC Demo Day. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Chrome extension. >> The hardest problem had nothing to do with the motor or the battery. >> It's probably the the the biggest challenge we've had in the company. One in every thousand flights in the US gets diverted to another airport. And kind of need 45 minutes of loiter, and then you need to go to something that could be like 100 miles away. Yeah. So, if you build a battery-electric aircraft, you kind of have to carry 2/3 of your battery needs to be for reserves. >> And unlike jet fuel, batteries don't get lighter. Their answer is a hybrid engine. >> We're basing it on on a very simple turboprop engine. >> It's one of the most inexpensive ones. >> We don't have to use it for most flights, but it's still adding about, I guess, 20% of the upfront cost of the aircraft. And I think it's worth it. You can fly up to 225 miles all electrically, and then you fly up to 500 miles with a hybrid system operational range. >> [music] >> That call comes out of the philosophy that Anders Borg from SpaceX about how you should treat risk. >> Traditional aerospace is like, well, the the impact is always catastrophic, so let's minimize the probability. We don't know anything until we know everything. Whereas, if you look at, hey, how do we minimize impact uh to getting it wrong, then you can select a process that's a lot cheaper, that's a lot easier to iterate on. Planes don't crash these days because of a broken wing, they crash because of broken logic. We want to build a software-defined vehicles, the computer on wings. >> Anders has heard all the doubts. For example, why [music] not just build flying taxis first? >> It's super cool. Like, they're really trying to build a flying car. We're attacking not the helicopter market, but the mainline, you know, like airplane market. While these these companies have like three or four passengers, we have you know, 36. We're also operating from an infrastructure that is already there. You know, there's 5,000 airports in the US. >> Another common question he gets is why not use hydrogen? >> And the same with hydrogen, the great thing about using hybrid electric is is already there. You know, there's 5,000 airports in the US. >> Another common question he gets is why not use hydrogen? >> And the same with hydrogen, the great thing about using hybrid electric is that it's a it's [music] already now at a at a and a significant like negative green premium. So, you're surfing on a much bigger wave. The planes we're trying to replace they're 40 years old. It's becomes an appreciating asset. The plane will actually be better in 10 years than when you buy it. It becomes like buying a house. >> 36 seats is only the beginning. >> We love to build a bigger plane. So, the large market is the narrow bodies. The 737 is the A3320. There's ridiculous backlogs. Somebody doing what SpaceX did with rockets on airplanes just makes sense. >> [music] >> Longer term, the plane's built for a world with fewer pilots in the cockpit. >> or remote pilot that is supporting many aircraft. Kind of like there's remote operators of Waymos. Then we're going to see autonomy happening in cargo where there's, you know, lower stakes and then, you know, eventually making its way into to aircraft. Obviously, a lot less noise. There's a lot less vibration as well. There's going to be more flights. They're going to be cheaper ticket, so you're going to be able to go to your neighborhood airport and take a plane [music] in the way you actually could in the past. >> It's also why Heart is building it here in LA, the new center of gravity for this kind of company. >> This is the ground zero, the most historic place when it comes to aviation. [music] You have the new space ecosystem that's kind of coming from SpaceX. You know, companies don't build planes, people do. This is the moment of seeing seeing it literally take off. This is obviously a moment I've imagined for the last 7 years [music] and even seeing it going down the runway is kind of gives me the goose bumps. So, it's Hopefully, I'll get a moment where I kind of start seeing [music] the forest for all the trees kind of thing. >> When this airs, you will have flown the largest electric airplane in the world. Come a long way from demo day 7 years ago. >> I'm I'm so grateful that you got that opportunity and now the day is here. It's going to be amazing. >> 7 years of hard work finally led to this. Their first flight on Wednesday, August 12th in Plattsburgh, New York. >> If you start a new hardware startup today everything that you know about building heart [music] and your entire career how how would you get started? >> I'm pretty good duck, right? Like I know a little bit how to swim. I know a little bit how to fly and I know a little bit how to walk and that's enough for me to know when I find somebody that's great. I would never start a company based on the fact that I wanted to have a company or be a founder. I would start because I really enjoy, you know, a problem. If we can get stuff that is lower emission, lower cost, lower pollution, [music] just better quality of life we should be doing it.…

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