We told you that collabs were all the rage. Yesterday, aviation giant GE Aerospace announced that it has teamed up with defense AI startup Merlin Labs to develop an “autonomy core” to build into its avionics system.
In a statement, the two companies said that this “next-generation autonomy and pilot-assist platform will be designed to bring AI-enabled capabilities to existing and future military and civil aircraft and meet the growing demand for crew reduction and uncrewed flight capabilities.”
The partnership’s first target is likely to be the planned cockpit overhaul of the aging KC-135 tanker. However, in the longer term, GE sees the Merlin partnership as reducing the need for human pilots across the board.
“Merlin has flight controls, natural language processing, and a lot of mission capabilities that we would put on these aircraft,” Merlin’s Chief Architect Jeff Saunders told Tectonic at AFA. “GE has displays and [flight management systems] that are sometimes on these aircraft, sometimes not, but it’s a capability that we need as part of the Merlin system.”
“We’re combining those together to create a product line that will be the next version of the Merlin Pilot, which will be deployable to many different aircraft,” he added.
When he says many different aircraft, he means it. As GE said in a statement, “GE Aerospace’s current Flight Management System footprint includes more than 14,000 aircraft globally, creating an opportunity to introduce Merlin’s advanced capabilities to legacy military platforms, which will define state-of-the-art technology for next-generation aircraft.”
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed: Merlin Labs is a newcomer on the scene—at least compared to 132-year-old GE Aerospace. The company was founded in Boston by Matt George in 2018 and primarily builds autonomous flight systems for both civil and defense applications.
The company builds takeoff-to-touchdown flight autonomy software called Merlin Pilot that—with human supervision—can take over aviation, navigation, and communication duties on fixed-wing aircraft. The idea, essentially, is to build an AI pilot that can replace the need for a human one.
- The company raised $105M in a Series B round back in 2022, bringing its valuation to $650M, according to PitchBook data.
- In August, they also announced plans to go public via a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) led by Inflection Point Asset Management next year. The deal includes over $125M in committed Private Investment in Public Equity (PIPE) capital, $78M of which was already funded at signing.
And their product has been pretty damn successful with both the DoD and giants in the aerospace sector. The company:
- Won a $105M contract with USSOCOM to put Pilot on the C-130J Super Hercules cargo aircraft last summer.
- Partnered with Honeywell to bring autonomy to a wider range of aircraft last October.
- Secured airworthiness approval from the Air Force for Pilot’s use on the KC-135 Stratotanker, then won a contract to make them autonomous last December.
- Was selected as one of six startups in Northrop Grumman’s Beacon autonomy testbed ecosystem in July, alongside Applied Intuition, Red 6, and Shield AI.
Holding hands: GE sees this new partnership as “a strategic fit between the companies’ capabilities and technologies.” Plugging Merlin’s autonomous Pilot into GE’s flight management software, they say, will “provide operators with a scalable, certifiable, and future-ready solution to meet the growing demand for crew reduction, SPO, and uncrewed flight capabilities.”
Plus, teaming up with GE massively increases Merlin’s exposure on the military aircraft front.
“By teaming with GE Aerospace, we are able to pair their open system architecture with Merlin’s autonomy capabilities to create and deliver the next generation of avionics systems, extending our work with existing customers, expanding the volume and types of platforms we support, and accelerating our revenue growth,” Merlin CEO Matt George said in a statement.