Certo raises £5M to push Capstone drone toward production
What's the deal? Certo Aerospace has secured £5 million to accelerate development of its Capstone autonomous heavy-lift aircraft. The early VC round adds capital to a British programme that has moved through three years of flight testing, Ministry of Defence demonstrations and integration work with BAE SystemsDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
What's the endgame? Capstone is a 600kg-class coaxial vertical take-off and landing uncrewed air system built for logistics, casualty evacuation, maritime operations, construction and defence. Two contra-rotating main rotors sit on the same axis, removing the conventional helicopter tail rotor and keeping the aircraft's footprint compact.
Why now? The aircraft has flown since 2023 and completed its third year of trials during 2026 under Civil Aviation Authority authorisation. The money matters most as the programme shifts from proving the aircraft can fly toward an engineering baseline fit for repeat production.
Figures published through BAE Systems give a maximum payload of 280kg in the integration configuration, endurance of up to ten hours and a maximum range of 300 miles. Certo's own material quotes payload up to 300kg depending on configuration.
What's been tested? Under the Ministry of Defence's Project MORRIGHAN, Capstone carried logistics and casualty-evacuation systems through autonomous take-off, navigation, descent and precision landing. Later Royal Navy work combined sonobuoy carriage, acoustic processing and data transmission for an anti-submarine warfare demonstration.
BAE Systems is working with Certo through FalconWorks to develop Capstone for military integration, including the British Army's Project NYX for next-generation autonomous aircraft that can operate alongside Apache helicopters. The joint proposal has been down-selected, with BAE targeting 2030 for initial operational capability across the wider programme.
What could go wrong? Moving from prototype to production demands stable drawings, controlled suppliers, defined assembly procedures and maintenance documentation — not the frequent redesign a test aircraft tolerates. Coaxial rotorcraft add their own burden: rotor-head geometry, transmission, vibration control and blade tracking all have to manage two large counter-rotating systems in close proximity, on top of the software, sensors and redundancy that autonomy requires.
Certo keeps a modular open-system approach, letting payloads, avionics, mission computers and communications links change without redesigning the whole vehicle. The same modularity extends to rotors, transmission, engine and undercarriage, giving the team a route to update individual modules as testing exposes limits.
The signal: At £5 million, the round sits in the upper range for an early-stage raise — a scale that reflects the heavier capital needs of hardware and defence programmes over software bets. For Certo, the test is converting flight-proven technology into a production system that can meet military standards by the end of the decade.
Read more: industrialnews.co.uk
Image credit: Generated with Gemini
