VÆRIDION has closed a €30 million Series A2 round to build the first conforming prototype of its nine-passenger, all-electric Microliner, and the European Commission has selected the company’s CAROLUS project for a €94.5 million Innovation Fund grant to set up final assembly at Oberpfaffenhofen Airport near Munich.

In a press release dated November 5, 2026, the Munich-based manufacturer put the combined equity and grant funding at more than €124 million. The two are separate: the equity pays for the first conforming aircraft and integrated battery and propulsion testing, while the grant agreement is expected to be signed in 2027, and the selection remains subject to its completion. VÆRIDION also said it now holds commitments for more than 130 aircraft, valued at more than €730 million.

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Who is backing the Series A2

The equity round was led by a European consortium of SHIFT Invest and Invest-NL. Existing investors World Fund, Project A and Vsquared Ventures took part, along with PAYBACK founder Alexander Rittweger and others. Including this round and earlier public funding, VÆRIDION said it has raised about €60 million to date.

SHIFT Invest is an Amsterdam-based venture capital fund that has backed more than 70 startups since 2009, and its investors include KLM, Schiphol and TU Delft, according to the release. Invest-NL supports entrepreneurs and projects in the Netherlands. World Fund reports €300M in assets under management, Project A reports €1.2B, and Vsquared Ventures counts Isar Aerospace and The Exploration Company in its portfolio.

“Over the past year, we have turned the Microliner from a validated design into hardware, with exceptional capital efficiency.”

Ivor van Dartel, founder and CEO of VÆRIDION, said that propulsion and battery technology is being tested at the company’s Oberpfaffenhofen facility, that the equity enables the first conforming aircraft, and that the grant supports the industrial capability for Microliner production. Thijs Gitmans, general partner at SHIFT Invest, said: “Regional aviation is one of the clearest cases where electrification makes both environmental and commercial sense.” He added that the company “has chosen a certification pathway regulators already understand.”

The Innovation Fund grant behind CAROLUS

CAROLUS will establish and ramp up a final assembly facility at Oberpfaffenhofen Airport. VÆRIDION said the project was chosen from 358 applications as one of only 12 large-scale projects, that it is the only aviation project in that category, and that VÆRIDION is the only German company in it.

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Climate Action said on May 29, 2026, that the Innovation Fund 2025 Net-Zero Technologies call, launched on December 4, 2025, and closed on April 23, 2026, drew 358 applications requesting €17.5 billion against an earmarked budget of €2.9 billion. The money comes from revenues of the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS). The Commission has since announced that it selected 77 net-zero technology projects for €3.4 billion in funding from the call launched in December 2025.

The grant follows earlier EU support for the programme. On March 3, 2026, the European Investment Bank (EIB) said its advisers were helping VÆRIDION, under the EU Innovation Fund’s project development assistance, to prepare a detailed business plan, a financing structure and a risk analysis, with the aim of readying the project for future Innovation Fund applications and other funding.

Where the Microliner programme stands

Design and certification basis

VÆRIDION was founded in 2021, according to the EIB, and is headquartered in Munich with subsidiaries in Delft and Brussels. The clean-sheet Microliner has a glider-inspired wing, patented integrated modular batteries and a multi-engine, single-propeller propulsion system. It targets a range of 400 km (about 216 nautical miles) with nine passengers under Instrument Flight Rules (IFR), or up to 550 km (about 297 nautical miles) with four passengers under Visual Flight Rules (VFR). Passenger and cargo versions are planned, and the company says the aircraft can carry either nine passengers or 10 m³ of cargo.

The aircraft is being developed to EASA CS-23 requirements. In the past 12 months, VÆRIDION completed its Preliminary Design Review and a second Pre-Application Contract with EASA. AirPro News covered the Preliminary Design Review milestone in June, when the company passed 100 aircraft commitments. In March 2026, it opened its production and test facility at Oberpfaffenhofen Airport, where it has powered on its electric engine for the first time.

Next steps on the ground

Battery packs and the propulsion system will next be integrated on a ground-test rig the company calls the “copper bird.” That work, together with wind-tunnel testing, supports the first conforming Microliner and flight-test preparations. The aircraft is engineered in Munich and Delft and will be built in Bavaria. The EIB’s March release gave 2027 as the target for first flight and 2030 for the start of scheduled service after certification.

The regional market case

VÆRIDION argues that regional aviation is highly exposed to fuel price shocks, saying jet fuel prices more than doubled year-on-year by October 2026. The company said more than 21,000 small turboprops serve regional routes worldwide, with an average age of 23 years, and that no new aircraft of this size has entered service in 30 years. Citing the European Regions Airline Association (ERAA), it said about 120 regional routes in Europe were discontinued in the five years before June 2026.

The Microliner targets operating costs below €0.40 per seat-kilometre, which the company said would allow fares at first-class rail ticket levels. It also cites a McKinsey estimate that the global regional air mobility market could reach up to $115 billion by 2035. In the EIB’s March release, van Dartel said Europe already has 2,300 regional airports.

The commitments come from regional airlines, charter operators and lessors, with ASL Group as launch customer. KLM, BayernLB and TrueNoord support the company through its Market Advisory Committee. AirPro News has followed the aircraft since the Microliner programme launch.

German IT specialist ISO-Gruppe has finished installing its SKYcontrol Tower electronic flight strip and ground surveillance system at Penang International Airport (PEN), the site of Malaysia’s first Remote, Digital and Virtual Tower (RDVT). The digital tower is due to take over aerodrome control as the airport’s conventional tower gives way to terminal expansion.

In an announcement dated November 3, 2026, ISO-Gruppe described the project as the first digital air traffic control in Asia. The company said the SKYcontrol Software Suite was fully installed and integrated into the existing infrastructure, and that the Remote Digital Virtual Tower Penang (RDVT Penang) will run alongside the existing tower system for about two months while controllers are gradually trained on the new digital processes.

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What SKYcontrol replaces in the Penang tower

The installation has three core modules: SKYcontrol EFS, SKYcontrol Ground Track and SKYcontrol RCMS. According to ISO-Gruppe, numerous interfaces connect them to a camera-based virtual situational display, to flight data from the wider air traffic management system and to the airport’s stand allocation planning.

The Electronic Flight Strip System (EFS) fully replaces paper flight strips. Controllers get a digital interface for tracking and sharing flight data such as estimated arrival and departure times, routes and clearances, with weather, active notices to airmen (NOTAMs) and airfield lighting status added to support the coordination of approach and taxi movements.

SKYcontrol Ground Track, the ground and approach surveillance system, replaces the existing approach radar display. The company said it provides second-by-second landing tracking, departure detection and information on taxiing and parking, and records data for future planning. The RCMS module will let the maintenance team monitor system status continuously once the system moves into its maintenance and warranty phase after testing.

Why Penang is moving away from its conventional tower

Malaysia set out the background in an information paper, DGCA 61/IP/04/16, presented at the 61st Conference of Directors General of Civil Aviation for the Asia and Pacific Region, held in Kuala Lumpur from 7 to 11 September 2026. The paper says Malaysia began its first RDVT project at Penang in February 2025 as part of airport development, using an accelerated approach because the existing control tower sits on land needed for terminal expansion and line-of-sight limits restrict visibility.

The RDVT gives controllers a 270° to 360° panoramic, high-definition digital view without a fixed-height tower, which removes the need to build a new tower and frees land for capacity upgrades, according to the paper. Two camera masts with high-resolution digital cameras cover the airport to reduce blind spots. Penang has a single runway, 04/22, of 10,997 feet, according to the AirPro Atlas.

The timeline Malaysia reported

The paper lists the milestones. The RDVT facility building was completed on 4 April 2026, and system installation with site, user and final acceptance tests was completed on 15 June 2026. Controller operational training ran from 19 June 2026 to 10 July 2026.

A ghosting and parallel operations phase, in which the conventional tower’s operations are monitored from the RDVT facility, began in the week of 13 July 2026 and was expected to last a minimum of about two months. If assessments are satisfactory, the paper says, the ghosting phase is expected to finish by November 2026, with services then moving progressively to the RDVT. The existing conventional tower will be unavailable from December 2026 because of the expansion programme.

ISO-Gruppe said the project is now in its final Operational Readiness and Airport Transfer (ORAT) phase, and that other third-party systems, including video walls and voice communication systems, have already been accepted. The paper lists network redundancy, timely regulatory coordination, human factors assessment and operational readiness programmes as the key considerations Malaysia identified.

A second major Malaysian customer for ISO-Gruppe

“The total project duration of just 14 months demonstrates the maturity of our SKYcontrol platform,” said Stephan Schaer, Project Manager and Authorized Signatory at ISO Software Systeme GmbH. He called the project a major milestone that supports further expansion in the growing Asian aviation market.

“Penang Airport’s air traffic control is our second major customer,” said Marcel Bender, Technical Project Manager at ISO Software Systeme GmbH. The first is Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA), a long-standing air traffic control client of the company. Beyond adapting the software to Penang’s requirements, ISO-Gruppe said it advised on operational process changes, including air traffic control clearance procedures.

AirPro News has also covered Avinor’s remote tower plan for Mo i Rana and a digital remote tower bid in North Carolina. ISO-Gruppe describes Penang International Airport as a key transport hub for northern Malaysia that handles passenger and cargo traffic. The airport is in the Bayan Lepas district, about 16 kilometers from George Town.

Wisk Aero has commenced operations at a new purpose-built vertiport at Hollister Municipal Airport in California, establishing a dedicated physical environment to test its autonomous Generation 6 electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft.

Announced in a company press release on October 30, 2026, following a ribbon-cutting ceremony the previous day, the facility will serve as a real-world testbed for precision landing technologies and terminal area flight procedures. The operational data gathered at the site will directly support the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) eVTOL Integration Pilot Program (eIPP) and inform broader certification efforts for advanced air mobility (AAM) infrastructure.

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Validating autonomous flight operations

The Hollister installation features a 100-by-100-foot vertiport pad designed to accommodate both piloted and autonomous operations. Wisk constructed the site using a modular design approach that incorporates elevated steel structures, integrated solar panels, and dedicated power banks. This modularity allows the infrastructure to be relocated for future testing requirements in other regions, such as Texas.

The transition from the project groundbreaking announcement on August 26, 2026, to the October 29 ribbon-cutting ceremony took approximately nine weeks. Local, state, and federal officials attended the opening event.

Wisk Aero Chief Executive Officer Sebastien Vigneron highlighted the operational necessity of the new site for the company’s testing program.

“Opening this vertiport for flight testing is a big moment for Wisk and the future of piloted and autonomous flight. Deploying our aircraft on a purpose-built vertiport gives us the exact physical setup needed to validate precision landing technologies and our complete autonomy stack,” Vigneron stated.

Hollister Municipal Airport Executive Director Jeff Crechriou noted that hosting one of the first on-airport vertiports capable of supporting autonomous operations positions the airport at the forefront of the AAM sector.

Regulatory alignment and infrastructure standards

The development of physical ground infrastructure remains a primary constraint for the eVTOL industry. Wisk built the Hollister facility to comply with existing FAA standards, intending to use the site to evaluate complex terminal area flight procedures. Testing will focus on missed approaches and precision landings, particularly in GPS-denied environments.

Vigneron noted that the site is designed to support all vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. The resulting data will feed into the FAA eIPP and the California Advanced Air Mobility Corridors Initiative, helping establish best practices for scalable vertiport integration.

This testing aligns with ongoing regulatory updates at the federal level. On October 22, 2026, the FAA released draft advisory circular AC 150/5390-4, titled “Vertical Flight Aircraft Infrastructure Design.” This document proposes new standards for pad sizes and approach paths, intended to replace the current interim vertiport design guidance and the existing heliport design circular. The FAA is accepting public comments on the draft until January 11, 2027. Data generated at the Hollister site could provide empirical support for finalizing these infrastructure standards.

Wisk corporate evolution and the Archer acquisition

The opening of the Hollister vertiport occurs during a period of significant corporate transition for Wisk Aero. Founded in 2019 as a joint venture between The Boeing Company and Kitty Hawk, Wisk became a wholly owned Boeing subsidiary in 2023. The company has focused exclusively on self-flying, all-electric air taxis, designing and building six generations of eVTOL aircraft and accumulating over 1,750 test flights.

The Generation 6 aircraft, designed as a four-passenger autonomous air taxi, completed its maiden flight in December 2025. The Hollister facility is specifically tailored to advance the flight testing program for this vehicle.

In August 2026, Archer Aviation reached a definitive agreement to acquire Wisk Aero, along with Insitu and SkyGrid, from Boeing. According to reporting by AVweb, the all-stock transaction will result in Boeing taking a nearly 20 percent equity stake in Archer. The deal is expected to close by the end of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals. The acquisition will consolidate Wisk autonomous technology portfolio under Archer while maintaining Boeing access to the technology through cross-licensing agreements.

AirPro News analysis

The rapid nine-week deployment of the Hollister vertiport highlights a strategic pivot within the AAM sector from vehicle design to the practicalities of ground infrastructure. While the industry has directed substantial capital toward aircraft certification, the physical bottlenecks of vertiport availability, power management, and standardized approach procedures remain critical hurdles for commercialization. By controlling its own test environment, Wisk can generate the specific operational data the FAA requires to finalize its pending vertiport design circulars. This empirical data gives the company a distinct advantage in shaping the regulatory framework that competitors will eventually have to navigate, particularly as the FAA transitions from interim guidance to permanent infrastructure standards.