Certo Aerospace raises £5m to industrialise Capstone heavy lift uncrewed aircraft
This article covers Certo Aerospace, an aerospace startup, and its £5m growth funding round to advance the Capstone autonomous heavy-lift uncrewed aircraft from a flight-tested demonstrator towards an industrial product. The funds are intended to finance engineering, certification and production-readiness work to support UK defence programmes, potential civil use-cases and suppliers needed for scaled manufacturing.
Certo Aerospace has raised £5 million in a growth funding round to push its Capstone autonomous heavy-lift uncrewed aircraft from flight-tested demonstrator towards an industrial product. The cash is intended to fund engineering work needed for repeatable production, certification and wider operational use after three years of flight testing and multiple defence demonstrations.
Why it matters
The investment marks a pivot point for a programme that has already proven basic flight performance and mission behaviours. Moving from prototypes to a production-ready aircraft requires controlled designs, qualified suppliers, test standards and maintenance documentation. That shift is where many aerospace projects stall, and additional capital now matters because it buys the engineering discipline and supplier development needed to scale beyond bespoke demonstrators.
Capstone’s development has also tied into UK defence programmes, giving the platform potential relevance to future procurement plans and to civil markets where crewless vertical lift could be useful.
Inside the product
Capstone is a 600kg-class coaxial vertical take-off and landing uncrewed air system. Its two contra-rotating main rotors sit on the same axis, removing the need for a conventional tail rotor and keeping the aircraft’s footprint compact while delivering the propulsion and control through the main rotor system.
Published figures from BAE Systems for an integration configuration report a maximum payload of 280kg, endurance of up to ten hours and a maximum range of about 300 miles. Certo’s broader material quotes payload capability of up to 300kg depending on configuration. The aircraft has been flying since 2023 and completed its third year of flight trials during 2026 under Civil Aviation Authority operational authorisation at several UK sites.
Testing has emphasised mission-relevant exercises rather than repeated basic flight envelopes. Under the Ministry of Defence’s Project MORRIGHAN, Capstone executed autonomous logistics and casualty-evacuation tasks including autonomous take-off, waypoint navigation, descent and precision landing. Royal Navy work has demonstrated sonobuoy carriage, acoustic processing and data transmission for an anti-submarine warfare scenario.
Certo retains a modular, open-systems approach. Payloads, avionics, mission computers, communications and other subsystems can be swapped without redesigning the entire vehicle. Major airframe elements are also modular, which should allow incremental updates as flight testing reveals limitations or new customer requirements emerge.
There are engineering and manufacturing complications that come with the coaxial layout. Rotor-head geometry, transmission components, vibration control, blade tracking and dual-rotor flight-control systems must be managed in close proximity, while autonomy adds software, sensor, communications and redundancy requirements to the mechanical complexity.
Who are the investors?
Certo has not publicly named the participants behind this £5 million growth round. The company previously announced a £3 million equity raise in April 2025; that earlier round helped accelerate flight testing but Certo has not disclosed investor names or lead backers for either round.
BAE Systems is a development partner rather than a listed investor, working with Certo through FalconWorks to integrate Capstone for more demanding military roles, including contribution to the British Army’s Project NYX programme. The joint proposal has been down-selected, with BAE identifying 2030 as a target for initial operational capability across the wider programme.
The lack of a public investor list makes it hard to judge runway and follow-on capital prospects, but the development work ahead typically requires further funding or programme-level procurement commitments. The deal will be watched by defence investors focusing on autonomous systems and by suppliers who may be asked to scale up component production if the programme reaches production phase.
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Founder perspective
The company frames the new money as targeted engineering investment to bridge the gap between a flight-proven demonstrator and an aircraft that can be built, certified and supported at scale. Certo’s emphasis on modularity is designed to keep the vehicle flexible for multiple missions while stabilising the baseline needed for serial manufacture.
The bigger picture
Certo’s progress highlights a recurring challenge for UK aerospace startups: moving from convincing demonstrations to an industrialised product requires both engineering depth and supply-chain commitments. The Capstone programme, with MoD demonstrations and a teaming relationship with BAE Systems, sits at the intersection of defence procurement timelines and emerging civil use-cases for uncrewed vertical lift, such as logistics, construction, firefighting and disaster response.
If Certo can convert its flight-test experience into a controlled production configuration, the company would join a small group of UK projects attempting to commercialise autonomous vertical lift. That transition will depend on further funding, clear certification pathways and demand from customers willing to support production volumes that justify supplier qualification and tooling.
This round is another data point in the broader UK and European push to develop autonomous and vertical-lift capabilities within domestic industrial bases, and will be watched by defence planners and industrial partners across the region.
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