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THE INVESTOR
the length of a
football pitch
can stay
airborne for
5
days
The success of HybridAirVehicles’
Airlander 10 airship relied on
crowdfunding.We look at the highs
and lows of investing via these
relatively new platforms
By James Hurley
C
rowdfunding is often sold as
a great source of finance for
young companies eager to get
big ideas off the ground. It
made perfect sense, then, for
the maker of an esoteric hybrid
of an airship and plane to turn to this fast-
emerging form of funding.
Bedfordshire-based Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV)
is the maker of the world’s largest aircraft, the
Airlander 10.The length of a football pitch, the
height of six double-decker buses and
irreverently nicknamed the ‘flying bum’, the
low-emission craft can stay airborne for five
days, and can land almost anywhere that’s flat.
Such an ambitious venture doesn’t come cheap
but, thanks to Airlander’s origins as a taxpayer-
funded project for the US military, which
invested about $300 million in the craft, it has
required a relatively modest £20 million
1
in
equity backing to get to the stage of test flights
2
.
Pioneered by Crowdcube and Seedrs in 2011,
equity crowdfunding, which allows investors to
acquire shares in private companies, has provided
almost £376 million of investment for UK
CROWD
PLEASERS