Wisk Aero, a Boeing subsidiary, has acquired Verocel, a software verification and validation company serving the aerospace industry for 25 years.
Wisk has an autonomous-first approach to electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft. The company’s Generation 6 aircraft, which is set to begin airborne testing this year, is designed to be supervised by humans, but not actually flown by them.
This means that, perhaps more than other companies building eVTOL vehicles, Wisk needs to ensure that its software is satisfactory.
“We have a huge amount of high-integrity software throughout the airplane and on the ground that needs to be verified,” Brian Yutko, CEO of Wisk Aero, told TechCrunch. It is important to ensure that high-integrity software is performing as it should, because any failure can cause serious damage, with potentially life-threatening consequences. “It needs to be validated, and it’s just a big field of work. So the Verocel team is going to provide expertise to ensure that all the software we build for the airplane meets the standards we expect them to meet.”
Wisk will absorb Verocel’s team of approximately 60 people, who bring deep expertise in DO-178C, a standard that provides guidelines for the development of safety-critical software for airborne systems.
DO-178C certification is one component of the Federal Aviation Administration’s type certification process, which certifies that an aircraft meets all design and safety standards. Wisk said Verocel’s expertise can not only help the company certify the Gen 6 aircraft, but will also help with future software development at Boeing.
To facilitate the certification process, Verocel offers a set of tools called VeroTrace that helps track and manage the lifecycle of software development and verification efforts through regulatory approval.
Neither Wisk nor Verocel shared the financial terms of the deal.
The deal echoes competitor Joby Aviation’s 2022 acquisition of Avionyx, an aerospace engineering software company. In both of their acquisitions, Wisk and Joby valued becoming more vertically integrated while also providing the necessary expertise to test and validate their software to accelerate the path to federal certification.
Verifying and validating all of Wisk’s software is one part of building and operating an autonomous airplane safety, Yutko said, noting that Wisk aims to commercialize its autonomous eVTOLs by 2030.
The company is already working on creating the infrastructure for the air taxi operation. On February, Wisk partnered with Sugar Land, a city near Houston, to identify and evaluate a site at the city’s regional airport to develop vertiport infrastructure for future air taxi operations. Earlier this month, Wisk entered into a memorandum of understanding with Houston Airports to consider locations for vertiport infrastructure that could help serve the greater Houston area.
