Thelen: “Four boys in the garage” – That’s how the first years of Lilium went

On May 4, 2019, everything at Lilium came to a standstill. Employees have gathered in the canteen and in front of screens. Some fold their hands in front of their faces as if they were praying. All eyes are on a shiny white aircraft: the five-seat Lilium jet.

Four years of work have led to this moment. Now the jet is about to take off for the first time. “Taking off in 3, 2, 1,” can be heard in the company’s video. The jet then takes off vertically from the ground. It wobbles slightly in the wind, but it floats.

For Keno Sanders, an engineer at Lilium at the time, it was a moment of maximum tension. “We were all so nervous,” he said a few years later in an interview with Gründerszene. All catastrophe scenarios were played out in the head: the jet could drift to the side, crash, burst into flames or explode. Instead, he took off and landed again. The employees burst into cheers.

Sanders remembers hugs, music and confetti cannons in the cafeteria. “It was one of the best days of my life,” he says. For Lilium, this flight was the most visible proof: the idea had actually become an aircraft.

But the story begins a few years earlier – with four engineers from the Technical University of Munich, a very big vision and investors who were willing to bet on something that initially sounded almost megalomaniacal.

The first investor: Frank Thelen

One of the first to believe in Lilium was Frank Thelen. Today Thelen is one of the best-known investors in Germany, also because of his appearances on the Vox program “The Lions’ Den”. Thelen was not only one of Lilium’s earliest investors, but was later one of those who tried to save the company with money and contacts – when the startup was on the verge of collapse at the end of 2024.

In an interview with Gründerszene, Thelen remembers his first meeting with the founders. It was, “to put it bluntly,” like meeting “the guys in the garage,” he says. It wasn’t a real garage, but a small rented room in a Munich funding project. There the founders experimented with electronic parts, sometimes ordering them from Alibaba, to find out whether their idea could even work.

The founders were Daniel Wiegand, Patrick Nathen, Sebastian Born and Matthias Meiner. Thelen describes them as “picture-book engineers”: technically strong, from a renowned university, influenced by Germany’s car and engineering culture. At the same time, they were not typical founders who threw around venture capital terms. On the contrary: “They were 100 percent engineers who didn’t know how venture capital worked,” says Thelen.

That’s exactly what convinced him. Not the perfect business plan, but the technical competence, the addition to the team and the size of the idea.

A childhood dream

The official origin story of Lilium leads to Daniel Wiegand. The founder and long-time head of the company repeatedly spoke in interviews about his early enthusiasm for flying. Aviation fascinated him even as a child, he said in the Handelsblatt podcast “Disrupt” in 2021. His pets had to be birds, he built model airplanes and started his gliding license at the age of 14.

In 2004, Wiegand won “Jugend forscht” with a model of an airplane wing that could change its shape and thus reduce fuel consumption. He later studied aerospace at the Technical University of Munich.

He says the idea for Lilium came to him during a semester abroad in Glasgow. There he saw a video of the V-22 Osprey, a US military aircraft with tilting rotors. It can take off and land vertically like a helicopter, but can fly faster and further than a classic helicopter.

He later convinced his fellow students Nathen, Born and Meiner. Together they began to calculate whether an electrically powered, vertical take-off aircraft would even be possible. In 2015 they founded Lilium GmbH, named after Otto Lilienthal, the German aviation pioneer.

Lilium wanted to build more than just a flying taxi

From the start, Lilium’s vision was bigger than what many associate with the term air taxi. While other eVTOL developers primarily thought about short urban routes – for example as an alternative to traffic jams in big cities – Lilium wanted to build a new high-speed means of transport.

Daniel Wiegand once described the goal as follows: Lilium should create a sustainable means of transport that would be accessible to everyone in the long term. The price should at some point be on the same level as an ICE ticket. Instead of building railway lines worth billions, medium-sized and small cities should be directly connected to each other.

The Lilium jet was supposed to fly electrically, reach speeds of up to 300 kilometers per hour and originally have a range of up to 300 kilometers. The company later had to correct this information downwards.

But the fundamental technical decision was crucial: Lilium opted for an eVTOL in jet form. This differentiated the Munich startup from many competitors who build their aircraft more along the lines of a helicopter. This made Lilium’s project more spectacular – but also more difficult.

The first million

Thelen’s entry was followed by a financing round with Atomico in 2016. Skype co-founder Niklas Zennström’s venture capital firm invested ten million euros in Lilium. By German and European standards, this was an exceptionally large early round.

Atomico’s entry was a signal to the industry: Lilium was not just a crazy idea from Munich, but a startup that top international investors trusted to build a new category of mobility.

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The team used the money to work on the first demonstrator in the following years. In April 2017, the small, unmanned prototype was supposed to show whether the technical concept worked. It was smaller and lighter than the later jet, was remotely controlled and had fewer rotors.

A video of the test flight shows the demonstrator taking off vertically, flying straight ahead, making a turn and landing vertically again. The first major hurdle had been overcome for the team. Lilium stated at the time that the technical design worked as planned. Now we can concentrate on the five-seat aircraft.

Significantly more money flowed in the same year. In September 2017, the Chinese tech group Tencent invested $90 million together with other investors. These included, among others, the Liechtenstein private bank LGT, Obvious Ventures of Twitter co-founder Ev Williams and again Atomico.

At this point, Lilium had already raised around 100 million euros – a rare amount for a German startup in 2017.

Working at Lilium: “We were in love with this idea”

The team grew with the money. Dirk Gebser joined Lilium in 2017. He had previously worked for companies such as Rolls-Royce, BMW and Airbus and later became Managing Director, where he was responsible for production, purchasing, engineering and quality, among other things.

The change from a corporation to a startup was “like day and night,” says Gebser. At Lilium we no longer had an assistant, we had to organize a lot of things ourselves, buy simple tools in the prototype workshop and work like a shirt.

Nevertheless, he describes the early days at Lilium as extraordinary. The interaction was open and honest, the team spirit was strong. People were happy about mistakes because they could learn from them. New employees were welcomed and applauded. For Gebser it was “one of the best times” of his long industrial career.

Keno Sanders also describes this phase in a similar way. “We were in love with this idea and this vision,” he says. Everyone was highly motivated and did more than their job description required.

So the employees weren’t just concerned about money or careers. According to Thelen, many could probably have earned more at Airbus, Boeing or other companies. What attracted them was the mission – and the proximity to decision-making in a company that wanted to build something completely new.

The highlight: the five-seat jet

In 2019, several hundred people are already working at Lilium. The next big milestone follows on May 4th: the first unmanned flight of the five-seat jet.

In a company video, Daniel Wiegand announces: “We promised the world a five-seater jet. And today we are delivering on that promise.” Then the countdown follows. The jet takes off, hovers briefly and lands again.

This was a triumph for Lilium. An emotional highlight for the employees who followed the flight. An image for the public that showed: This startup doesn’t just build slides and visions. There’s an aircraft on the ground – and it’s flying.

But it is precisely this moment that, in retrospect, raises a question: Was the bet that Lilium took perhaps too big from the start?

The company didn’t just want to build a flying taxi, but rather a fully electric vertical take-off aircraft in jet form. It wanted to bring together reach, speed, sustainability, affordability and industrial scale. This required enormous technical advances, new infrastructure, approvals – and a lot of capital. At the end there was 1.5 billion euros in Lilium.

You can now hear the whole story of the German air taxi developer: Our investigative storytelling podcast “Cashburners: the Lilium Story” tells the rise and fall of the company in six episodes. Anywhere there are podcasts.