Airbus

Thomas d'Halluin serves as CEO and leads the investment committee. The fund maintains autonomy from the parent company, with an independent committee authorized to approve investments without requiring Airbus SE sign-off on individual deals.

It is structured as a financially motivated VC with strategic alignment to the mothership, not a captive strategic business unit. The fund explicitly reserves the right to back companies that may never become Airbus suppliers, measuring itself against market-rate venture returns rather than internal project ROI.

The fund focuses on seed through Series B rounds, typically deploying between $500,000 and $15 million per initial investment. It occasionally participates in later rounds for portfolio companies reaching commercial maturity.

Its mandate covers autonomous flight, space infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, sustainable propulsion, and quantum computing applications for mobility. It avoids classic aerospace supply-chain plays and functions that duplicate Airbus's internal R&D roadmaps, instead seeking frontier technologies that could redefine the industry.

The fund actively co-invests alongside top-tier deep-tech and frontier-tech VCs globally. Its corporate identity often provides deal flow from startups that value the industrial validation and certification expertise Airbus brings, rather than competing on purely financial terms.

Active across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific. It maintains investment professionals in Menlo Park, Toulouse, and Tokyo, with portfolio companies concentrated in the United States, France, Germany, Japan, and Israel.

It launched its initial consolidated capital pool in 2015, and announced a second fund of $155 million in 2021. The second fund expanded the team and sharpened the focus on deep tech and space economy investments.