Think of this as giving BETA’s electric aircraft a highly trained digital co-pilot that can eventually fly the plane by itself. Near Earth brings the “brain and senses” software so BETA can get to safe self-flying aircraft faster.
Reduces the time and cost for BETA Technologies to design, test, and certify safe autonomous (or highly automated) flight for its aircraft, instead of building all autonomy technology in-house from scratch.
Deep domain-specific autonomy know-how (flight control, perception, safety cases) and integration into BETA’s airframe and operational data, which makes the combined system hard to replicate quickly by new entrants.
Hybrid
Unknown
High (Custom Models/Infra)
Safety certification and regulatory approval for autonomous operations; real-time reliability constraints in safety-critical avionics.
Early Adopters
Partnership between an electric aircraft OEM (BETA) and a dedicated autonomy provider (Near Earth) to accelerate a vertically integrated but partner-enabled autonomy stack, rather than pure in-house or generic off-the-shelf autonomy, positioning them for early regulatory-approved autonomous eVTOL/aircraft operations.