The founders of Seattle-based Outbound Aerospace want to shake up the aviation industry with a blended-wing airplane design that takes advantage of advances in 3D printing and lightweight materials. And they’ve received a commitment of up to $500,000 to help get their idea off the ground.
Outbound aims to take advantage of the same kind of rapid innovation that propelled SpaceX to its leading role in the launch industry. So, would it be too much of a cliche to call it “the SpaceX of aviation”?
“Everyone says they’re the SpaceX of, you know, ‘Z,'” said Jake Armenta, a former Boeing engineer who’s one of Outbound’s founders and its chief technology officer. “But I really hope that we can harness a lot of that energy in our company.”
Even though Outbound hasn’t yet emerged fully from stealth mode, Armenta has recently been sharing more information about the venture and its vision for the future, thanks to a string of positive developments.
Armenta and his fellow co-founder, Outbound CEO Ian Lee, have known each other since they were both engineering students at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Lee went into medical devices after college, while Armenta worked on Boeing projects ranging from the 777X jetliner to the Starliner space taxi.
As time went on, Armenta became increasingly intrigued by the rise of commercial space ventures. In 2020, he left Boeing to take on an engineering role at Relativity Space, which launched its first 3D-printed rocket last year.
Armenta’s work on the frontiers of aerospace led him to the view that new technologies just might shake up the status quo in aircraft design, just as they did in rocket design.
“Many of these technologies that have been game-changing in rocketry can be brought over and are very directly applicable to aircraft,” he said, “because essentially, a very large flying rocket and a very large aircraft are kind of similar in terms of what they’re doing, and in terms of the disciplines and the skills that you need to involve to make each one work.”
Armenta left Relativity Space in early 2023, and for more than a year, he and Lee have been fine-tuning the design for a blended-wing airplane they call Olympic — a design that Armenta said could conceivably be scaled up to the size of, say, a midsize Boeing 757 passenger jet.
“We are using a bunch of 3D printing in it, in a handful of places,” Armenta said. “We do have a patented manufacturing process that we’re still working through.”
Could Outbound Aerospace actually create a new kind of passenger aircraft, joining the likes of Boeing and Airbus in the plane-building business? It might seem presumptuous for a stealthy startup to talk about pulling off a feat that typically requires millions or even billions of dollars. But Outbound’s founders are doing more than talking about it.
Armenta said Outbound raised about $60,000 in angel funding at the beginning of this year. Then it received a commitment for funding from a venture capital firm called Antler. The firm is investing $250,000 in Outbound, said Rike Bergérus, Antler’s vice president and global head of communications. “Additionally, we have committed to match 50% of funds raised from external investors, up to $250K, in Outbound Aerospace’s next round,” Bergérus told GeekWire via WhatsApp.
Armenta said the funding commitments will provide Outbound with “enough money to take the next steps and begin building a one-eighth-scale variant of our aircraft, a demonstrator plane.” He said the demonstrator is being built in the Dallas area, Lee’s home base, using some innovative 3D-printing techniques. The plane will undergo final integration in Seattle, and then head for flight tests in Oregon “well before the end of the year,” Armenta said.
Outbound is partnering with Collinear Group, an engineering consulting firm based in Renton, Wash., to develop certification plans, he said.
“We have on payroll seven people formally employed here,” Armenta said over the phone from Dallas. “We have about another eight people who are contracting and consulting at various levels. Our team includes people from Hermeus, myself from Relativity Space, other people from Relativity and other companies like SpaceX and Stoke. And then we have another, like, between five and 10 people who are just helping out for free.”
What Outbound Aerospace doesn’t yet have is a billionaire on its side. SpaceX has Elon Musk. Relativity Space has Mark Cuban. Stoke Space has Bill Gates. Hermeus has Steve Case. Armenta is hoping that the flight of the subscale demonstrator will attract the kind of financial support Outbound will need to gain altitude.
“We’re going to raise a little bit more to close out this pre-seed round, and then at the end of this year — after we fly our demonstrator, after we have unveiled our full-size design — at that point, that’s when we’re going to raise a full-on, large seed round, comparable to what other aerospace startups are doing,” Armenta said. “And from there, we intend to keep going.”
How close will Outbound Aerospace come to the flight plan that Armenta is laying out? Stay tuned: The next six months could make for a wild ride.