Boeing, a New York-listed plane maker, has spun off its corporate venturing unit, HorizonX Ventures, in a secondaries deal with AE Industrial Partners (AEI), a capital provider to the aerospace industry with $3.5bn in assets under management.
The move follows a similar restructuring of peer Airbus’s 67 innovation vehicles into the Airbus InnovationX unit under Christian Lindener and Airbus Ventures under managing partner Thomas d’Halluin over the past 15 months as covid-19 impacted travel.
The independent and expanded venture capital group, AEI HorizonX, will initially manage the 40 portfolio companies backed by Boeing and then look to make new investments. Its size has not been disclosed.
The current HorizonX Ventures team, led by Brian Schettler – a GCV Powerlist 2020 award winner – since its launch in 2017, will move to AEI HorizonX with its current portfolio. Schettler will lead the new platform and become a partner at AEI.
Boeing will continue to be a long-term strategic investor in AEI HorizonX and will remain the anchor investor for the current fund in addition to AEI HorizonX’s first standalone fund, which is planned for 2022, it said.
Boeing will partner AEI HorizonX through its enterprise technology office and applied innovation team, and will retain its global accelerator programmes.
AEI and Boeing will maintain a technology pipeline with portfolio companies and continue regularly working with the startups to connect portfolio companies with Boeing’s technical capabilities and help bridge new innovations into the company.
Marc Allen, chief strategy officer and senior vice-president of strategy and corporate development at Boeing, said: “The partnership with AEI and future partners broadens our investor base, enables HorizonX to invest at a rapid pace and gives Boeing access to more outside innovation than ever through this investment collaboration.”
David Rowe, managing partner at AEI, added: “The AEI HorizonX platform will provide us with a foundation to build out a new investing pillar focused on transformative businesses and technologies critical to the evolution of our target markets and their impact on the environment.”
Brian Schettler said: “This partnership brings new early-stage investors to the market, unlocking expanded capital and commercial opportunities for entrepreneurs building the future of sustainability, mobility, space, manufacturing and the technologies in between.
“I will be leading this new venture platform as partner, head of AEI HorizonX, and will be joined by an awesome group of legacy HorizonX investing colleagues: Michael Lohnert, Beckett Jackson, Martha Cosgrove and Colin Lovell. The team will also be joined by four great investing professionals from AEI: Laurence Vigeant-Langlois, Malika Gummalla, Tyler Rowe and Eugene Kim.”
Photo: Brian Schettler
