Lilium

» see lilium.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

in '24 i was working on edge AI for UAVs in ankara. lilium had been the german eVTOL hype-cycle product since '17 or '18, the kind of project anyone in the UAV-adjacent space saw at every trade show without believing the timeline. lilium was the munich startup that had raised over 1.5 billion dollars on the promise of a 36-fan electric jet that could land in city parks. the funding-to-flight-hours ratio was the warning sign on the way in. nothing about the noise envelope or the battery energy density worked. the company spent ten years failing to escape that and then ran out of money in december 2024.

this is mostly told from the press releases and the bankruptcy filings. four engineers out of TU munich founded lilium in 2015. daniel wiegand was the CEO and the public face for the next nine years. the company name came from otto lilienthal, the 1890s glider pioneer who died in a crash near berlin. the initial pitch was a 5-seat all-electric vertical-takeoff jet with no tail rotor, the propulsion through electric ducted fans mounted in tilting flaps along the wing.

the funding history was the story. atomico and tencent led early rounds in '17 and '18. a 240 million dollar round led by tencent landed in march '20. a SPAC merger with qell finished in september 2021 and listed lilium on nasdaq at a 2.4 billion dollar valuation despite no significant revenue. the SPAC era was kind to companies with renderings and aggressive timelines, lilium had both. the prototype 5-seat 'phoenix' jet flew demonstration test flights. the 7-seat production jet stayed in design through 2024.

this part i watched happen in real time. the financial slide was visible through '23 and '24. accumulated losses hit 1.36 billion euros by march 2024. a follow-on private placement fell short. the company was negotiating a 50 million euro german federal loan guarantee through the fall of '24 and the bundestag budget committee voted it down on october 16. eight days later the board filed for self-administration under the german insolvency code. operations ceased on december 20 with around a thousand layoffs. on december 24 a consortium called mobile uplift corporation announced plans for an asset deal. the deal fell through in february 2025 and lilium filed for final insolvency soon after.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the jet was actually trying to do ~

the technical case for lilium was the cleaner one in the eVTOL field. the ducted-fan design in tilting flaps meant no exposed rotor blades and a quieter acoustic envelope than the multicopter-style designs joby and archer were betting on. the tradeoff was efficiency. ducted fans had higher disk loading and worse hover efficiency than open rotors, the lilium jet needed enormous battery energy to hover and then more to transition to forward flight. the published range targets kept getting revised down through every press cycle.

the regulatory path was the other unsolved part. EASA had not certified any eVTOL design for commercial passenger service in 2024 and the type certification timeline for a vehicle with no prior in-service experience was a multi-year process under the SC-VTOL framework. lilium was applying in parallel with joby and archer. no one was first.

~ what the money was actually buying ~

this part is the post-mortem nobody wants to write. the SPAC era let pre-revenue hardware companies raise as if they were software companies. lilium took 1.5 billion dollars and burned it on engineering staff and flight-test infrastructure and SPAC merger costs themselves, with a target launch date that kept sliding right. the prototype phoenix jet did fly. the production 7-seat jet did not fly with passengers. the company never charged a customer.

the october 2024 federal loan refusal was the cleanly-dead moment. germany has a history of saving strategic engineering employers and the bundestag refusing this particular guarantee was a vote of no confidence on lilium's path to revenue. the founders had been honest the whole way that another two years of runway and another billion in capex was the minimum required for type certification. neither was coming.

~ the day it died ~

december 20 2024 was the operations shutdown. around a thousand engineers and operations staff lost their jobs that day, the wessling factory went idle, the test prototypes were grounded. four days later on december 24 the mobile uplift corporation consortium issued a press release announcing it would acquire the assets and restart operations. it was a christmas-eve announcement with no signed agreement behind it.

the mobile uplift deal fell through in february 2025 when the consortium's promised funding failed to materialize. lilium then filed for final insolvency. the IP and the test airframes went into the german insolvency administrator's process. the lilium brand was effectively over before the spring 2025 air show season. by then the eVTOL category had moved past the SPAC-era startup tier and was being carried by joby and archer with their own delayed certification timelines.

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