The world is loud. If delivery drones and air taxis – also known as electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft – gain the level of market saturation investors are hoping for, cities and neighborhoods are only going to get noisier.
That’s the assumption, anyway. But Whisper Aero does not seem to care much for assumptions.
The premise of the two-year-old startup is that there should not be a trade-off between technological progress and noise: You should be able to quietly rid your lawn of leaves, heat and cool buildings, and even take an air taxi ride. To get to that future, Whisper says it has developed a never-been-done-before electric propulsion device (to get really specific, an electric ducted fan) that’s both quieter and more efficient than ones already on the market.
Whisper is headed by Mark Moore, a former executive at Uber Elevate, the ride-sharing giant’s ambitious air taxi initiative that it later ...