Accoring to a video they’ve got 925k€ in grants. Five full time employees.
Who the hell gave them that kind of money? They don’t seem to have much going on.
Lets congratulate them 
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Makes me want to rekindle my startup idea.
Maybe we should have a research development funding call wiki here and launch it as a group …
Bagsy not organising the ICO / crowdfund /
Funding calls as well as investment calls will definitely be a part of the awesystems.info page. Probably fed through a forum thread.
I’m learing so many new expressions from you.^^ So you’re not going to organise it.
Well I’m not going into the whole funding thing anytime soon either.
A publicly traded awes fund would be interesting.
Ewind is familiar to me as an AWE startup in the US NW that I have interacted with since their founding. They naively thought they could invent a better kite without help from the kite expert culture in the area. A million dollars is what it took to prove them wrong, and now they are seen using hobby kites in a primitive way.
The millions being raised by so many players accurately represents the early AWE economy as a growing R&D market. Billions more in R&D will be spent before AWE becomes a standard energy source in the global energy market.
If it’s as easy to acquire massive fundng as you claim, why haven’t you done so, or have you?
So far major funding has only gone to highly promoted ventures, from Magenn and KiteGen, to Makani and Ampyx. I support the idea that this money helps investors soonest see predicted weaknesses in high-complexity AWE, or AWE by non-aviation culture.
I walked away from GoogleX’s failed Moonshot Factory to be blessed so far with micro-funding from many sources, and look forward to more. High-complexity developers really do need more funding than low-complexity players, based on a higher capital cost structure for complex AWES.
Let low-complexity evolve hungry, to win the AWE race most cost-effectively. My choice would be for ALL serious AWE players to get modest funding.
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Hello Dave S…
We keep our R&D fairly low key…the little engine that could…
The hobby kites were used to test the software we are developing. We’re leaving actual AWE kite development to you, since you are the resident expert. How is your technology development coming along?
You won’t see any fancy prototypes coming from eWind or fancy videos depicting what we’re developing. We’re a grassroots start up and have greatly appreciated the funding from the USDA, as it has brought us to a single tethered energy drone, that flies crosswind up to altitudes of 500’. We have a functioning ground station and are producing electricity. As anyone in AWE knows, this technology is not easy and development is slow. We prefer to be cheerleaders for anyone who is trying to tackle the AWE challenges.
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Good to see eWind sharing a bit more. Welcome to the forum!
Absence of evidence of progress isn’t evidence of absence of progress, but indicative.
I personally doubt, that eWind will become profitable with other companies being much further ahead. Is there some secret sauce, I’m not seeing?
Speaking for me personally, I am more likely to succeed if there are more others working in the field. There’s more knowledge around, more funding available, and more opportunities for collaboration. And of course in this field, the sky is big enough for many products to flourish, now or after others have paved the way.
I think picking the winners is still very difficult. Anyone could make it
It is a three years old video showing an interesting small winch-generator system that could be suitable for experiments with different kites.
It would be great if any AWE company agrees to make some experiment players cannot do easily, for example using Low radius loop. Perhaps some collaborative way could be a mean to attract some small investments.
That’s an oldy but goodie! We were gathering data for one of the grant requirements. Our focus is small wind - <100kw. This is the space we have chosen to develop technology around. No interest in utility scale development. As with a few other AWE companies in small wind, our focus is to keep our system portable and one that is applicable anywhere in the world. To date, we have a rigid wing aerial device that flies crosswind, attached to a ground generation station. We are creating power and are now focused on the software component…we have achieved stable and reliable flight with a single tether energy device (TED). Our device, as of now, has no onboard motors or propulsion system. We launch from the ground and rely on a ground wind of 10mph to launch successfully. The next step is working on the autonomous launch system. We run lean and have accomplished quite a bit with a small team and limited funding. AS always, we cheer everyone on who is working toward commercializing this technology.
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That is wise and goes along with the recent industry analysis by Dr. Harrop, which the forum members mostly agreed with.
100kW Awes either replacing diesel gensets in combination with storage or used together with diesel gensets, replacing them when there is enough wind will be an important market. Many other developers are targeting it as well and there’s also competition from solar.
Maybe there’s an even smaller niche… Things noone else is doing, which I can think of are rigid kites for ship propulsion and dedicated awes sailing vessels. But when noone is doing it there’s probably a reason. Uncharted waters.