Lilium

Lilium (Lilium GmbH, later Lilium Aerospace GmbH) was a German aerospace company founded in 2015 by four Technical University of Munich graduates — Daniel Wiegand, Sebastian Born, Matthias Meiner, and Patrick Nathen. Headquartered near Munich (Gauting/Oberpfaffenhofen, Bavaria), it set out to develop the Lilium Jet, an all-electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft intended for regional air-taxi service.

The company's defining innovation was its electric ducted-fan jet propulsion system — dozens of small electric fans embedded in tilting flaps, rather than the open rotors used by most eVTOL competitors. The design targeted a roughly 5-to-7-seat aircraft with a cruise speed around 250–300 km/h and a planned range of about 250–300 km, certified as a fixed-wing aircraft and marketed as quieter and zero-emission in flight. Lilium flew a half-scale "Falcon" demonstrator in 2015 and a five-seat "Phoenix" demonstrator in 2019.

Lilium went public on NASDAQ in September 2021 via a SPAC merger and grew to roughly 950 employees by 2024, led by CEO Klaus Roewe. Despite raising well over a billion dollars, it never reached commercial service, and its targets for first commercial flights (initially aimed at 2024, with announced sites in Germany, Florida, and Brazil) slipped repeatedly.

The company entered insolvency in October 2024. A rescue deal via the Mobile Uplift investor consortium briefly raised hopes of restarting operations, but the promised funding failed to materialize, leading to a second and final insolvency in February 2025. Some assets were sold (including deals with Archer Aviation and Vaeridion), but the flight prototypes found no buyer and were reported in April 2026 to be broken up for scrap. Lilium is now defunct — any B2B framing should reflect that it is a wound-down/insolvent venture rather than an active vendor or partner.