Start-up HyLight raises 3.7 million euros for hydrogen airship

On Monday, April 15, startup HyLight, which designs hydrogen-powered airships, announced that it has raised €3.7 million from venture capital firms and two years after its founding. business angels. This autonomous drone, twelve meters long and two meters wide, carries cameras and sensors to allow infrastructure operators to check the condition of their installations, such as power lines, pipelines or roads. Special feature: it is decarbonized and therefore does not release greenhouse gases.

“Initially we wanted to create a drone that could inspect any type of infrastructure from the air, that could fly for long periods of time and, above all, with zero emissions.”Says HyLight manager Martin Boken, 25, one of the co-founders of the company, which started in 2022 after leaving the Troyes University of Technology (Aube).

Very quickly, due to weight reasons, the drone idea was abandoned in favor of a lighter helium airship that can fly for ten hours and cover 350 kilometers thanks to hydrogen fuel. In addition, it is easily transported to test locations.

Recruitment of specialists

Six prototypes of this aircraft, called the HighLighter, have been developed, which can carry ten kilograms of equipment. A year-long experiment is being carried out in Nord-Pas-de-Calais with Enedis, a subsidiary of EDF, to monitor its power lines and provide preventive maintenance.

Based in Essonne, at the 217 Air Base of Brétigny-sur-Orge, the young company intends to continue its development thanks to fundraising. It plans to boost its workforce — which will grow from ten people to about fifteen by the end of 2024 and to twenty-five in 2025 — by hiring specialists in various fields, such as embedded systems. It also plans to expand its activities to monitoring forests and sea-level change.

These autonomous aerial vehicles, which are greener devices than drones, helicopters and satellites, are just the beginning. In October 2020, RTE, the power transmission network, tested a diridrone designed by CNIM Air Space without going further, ultimately preferring aircraft, in addition to a fleet of helicopters, for the maintenance and monitoring of high and very high voltage lines. This airship project has since been abandoned by its designers, whose company was taken over by Toulouse aerospace equipment manufacturer Hemeria.