Aero Enterprise: An EIC Accelerator Story of Wind Turbine Drones

Rotor blades are the part of a wind turbine that breaks most expensively, and checking them has long meant sending technicians up on ropes. Aero Enterprise, a company from Linz in Upper Austria, set out to replace them with a robot helicopter. In the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2 round of 5 June 2019 it won a grant for A2Miro, a project to make its SensorCopter inspect offshore wind turbines on its own, with an EU contribution of €1,554,456.75 towards a total cost of €2,220,652.50, according to CORDIS. The European Commission's list of winners for that cut-off names Aero Enterprise GmbH of Linz as the only beneficiary of the project.

Seven years later the company is insolvent. The Austrian company register records the opening of insolvency proceedings on 26 March 2026 and two insolvency administrators, Matthias Pichler and Rudolf Mitterlehner, appointed on 25 March 2026, according to the official publication platform evi.gv.at and North Data, which mirrors the register. Whether the proceedings are a bankruptcy or a restructuring, and how large the debts are, could not be verified: no creditor association report or press article on the case was found.

Where Aero Enterprise Stands Now

The register shows a company whose ownership had just been reshuffled when it failed. On 30 December 2025 changes to the shareholders were entered, leaving the founder Robert Hörmann, Gottfried Brunbauer, the investment firm CARPE, the Upper Austrian venture fund OÖ HightechFonds and the Hamburg-based Buss Energy Group as owners, with share capital of €60,944, according to evi.gv.at. Three months later the insolvency administrators were in charge. The company's balance sheets up to the year 2024 were filed, the last on 19 April 2025, but their figures sit behind paywalls and could not be checked for this article.

The company's website is still online and still sells inspection services, software and the AERO Flight Intelligence System, but carries a 2023 copyright line and no news of the insolvency. North Data also lists a patent publication for "Equipment and Method for Inspecting Power Generation Structures" on 1 April 2026, a week after the administrators were appointed; who owns that patent now is not public.

On 30 July 2026 a new company, Aerios GmbH, was registered at Industriezeile 35 in Linz, the same street address, with a stated business of drone control software, an AI data platform, drone hardware add-ons and drone-based image capture "insbesondere von Windkraftanlagen", especially of wind turbines, according to evi.gv.at. Its shareholders include CARPE, which has held shares in Aero Enterprise since 2015, alongside its managing directors Christian Raml and Thorsten Zander and a fourth shareholder, Aleksandr Bondartsev. Whether Aerios has taken over Aero Enterprise's technology, staff or customers has not been announced.

The Technology: A Helicopter Instead of a Rope Team

Most blade inspection drones are multicopters with four or more small rotors. Aero Enterprise built its SensorCopter on helicopter technology instead, which it said keeps the aircraft stable at high wind speeds. In 2017 the SensorCopter was a mini-helicopter with a rotor span of more than two metres, carrying a high-resolution camera and an infrared camera, and certified by the Austrian aviation authority Austro Control, according to Trending Topics. Hörmann, a former German military pilot and aircraft mechanic, told pressetext that year that it had examined 80 rotor blades and other vertical structures such as bridges and dams, with a team of seven.

The second half of the product was software. AERO-View turned flight images into a 3D view of the blade, and AERO-Lyse classified damage and produced reports, which Windtech International reported in September 2018 when the company opened the software to service partners flying their own drones. In September 2019 the SensorCopter made its first offshore inspection flight in the North Sea; the company said it was protected against salt water, flew for more than 30 minutes and worked in winds up to 14 metres per second near the turbine, according to Windtech International.

By the end of the EU project the emphasis had shifted from the company's own helicopter to a sensor and autopilot package for standard drones. Its website now describes the AERO Flight Intelligence System as hardware and software that "calculates the flight path in real time" and keeps the drone at an optimal distance from the blade, and lists compatibility with DJI M300 and M350 drones. That is a reasonable commercial choice in a market dominated by DJI hardware, but it means the bespoke offshore helicopter at the centre of A2Miro is no longer the lead product.

What A2Miro Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

A2Miro followed a €50,000 Phase 1 feasibility study under the same acronym, A2MIRO, which ran from August to November 2018. The Phase 2 project ran from 1 November 2019 to 31 August 2023, according to CORDIS. The objective was a helicopter that inspects an offshore turbine autonomously in less than two hours, with a sensor head combining lidar, visual and infrared cameras that detects defects as small as 0.5 mm, and machine learning in the AERO-Lyse software to plan maintenance. The company forecast that this would cut the levelised cost of offshore wind electricity by about 5%, add 17 jobs and earn €8 million in cumulative net profits by 2030.

The final periodic report, covering November 2021 to August 2023, describes two strands. On the technical side it reports work on beyond-visual-line-of-sight flight, longer endurance and a sensor head using simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) to find turbines and plan its own inspection path, and lists a "first test flight with the SC-NG", a next-generation SensorCopter. On the business side it reports staff placed in northern Germany, 60 offers for 2023, customers including RWE, wpd, Nordex, Max Bögl and Zeitview, two Flight Intelligence Systems delivered to the United States, a marketing partnership offered by DJI in 2022, and an offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea inspected in 2023 at up to 11 turbines a day. It blames the prolonged Covid-19 crisis for making it "very difficult to get directly to the customer".

These customer names and figures come from the company's own report. None of the named customers has announced a contract, and the Baltic Sea wind farm is not named, so they could not be confirmed independently.

1. Autonomous flight system with AI damage analysisDeliveredFlight Intelligence System sold on the company website; two units to the US per the CORDIS report.
2. Offshore wind farm inspectionsPartlyBaltic Sea inspection in 2023 reported by the company only; a North Sea flight in 2019 predates the project.
3. Long-range autonomous offshore helicopter (SensorCopter NG)Not achievedOnly a first test flight reported; no product launch announced by the company or anyone else.
4. 17 jobs and €8M cumulative profit by 2030Not achievedInsolvency proceedings opened in March 2026.
5. On timeUnclearRan 46 months, 1 November 2019 to 31 August 2023; whether the end date was extended could not be verified.

The two CORDIS texts do not agree on the size of the prize. The project objective promises cost savings of €35 million for the offshore wind industry; the final report says €25 million for global offshore wind. Neither is a measured result.

The Money and the Owners

Aero Enterprise never announced a priced funding round. Its outside capital came from strategic and regional investors. CARPE, an investment company from Klagenfurt, became the first investor in 2015, according to Trending Topics. OÖ HightechFonds joined in November 2018, according to North Data. In August 2020 Buss Energy Group, a Hamburg wind energy services company, bought a 24.9% stake, as reported by Windmesse and Windtech International. The purchase price was not disclosed. North Data also lists €250,000 of Covid-19 state aid in April 2022.

Aero Enterprise does not appear in the EIC Fund's list of invested companies, checked across all 16 pages on 8 October 2026; its 2019 award was grant only, so no EIC equity was ever part of the deal. The team stayed small: seven people in 2017, and 1 to 10 employees on the company's karriere.at profile, which names Peter Fromme-Knoch as chief executive while the register lists Daniel Kubala as managing director.

Why Europe Should Care

Europe's climate targets rest heavily on wind. When the Commission presented its European Wind Power Action Plan on 24 October 2023, it said that reaching the target of at least 42.5% renewable energy by 2030 requires installed wind capacity to grow "from 204 GW in 2022 to more than 500 GW in 2030", according to the Commission's announcement. Every one of those turbines needs its blades inspected, and the cheaper and safer that is, the lower the cost of the electricity. A European supplier of autonomous inspection, rather than one dependent on a single Chinese drone maker, fits the EU's interest in its own supply chain. Aero Enterprise ended up building its system for DJI drones, and then ran out of road.

The Verdict

Aero Enterprise, its insolvency administrators and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.