Drone startup 3EA intentionally targets business customers, but has had to wait years for approvals from the aviation authority. Now they deliver regularly every day.
Norman Koerschulte (Koerschulte Group) and Marius Schröder (3EA) have jointly set up regular operations for delivery drones. 3EA
The milling head breaks, a certain connecting piece or the right tool is missing. This situation is common on construction sites or in workshops. That’s a problem because the entire construction process often comes to a standstill. “If in doubt, someone has to jump into the sprinter, drive ten, 20 or 30 kilometers to get the part and drive all the way back,” says Marius Schröder. This is already quite uneconomical, but if the driver is also stuck in a traffic jam, situations of this kind can quickly completely blow up the time and therefore also the cost plan.
What was previously considered more or less unavoidable could be solved quickly with the help of delivery drones – at least if Marius Schröder has his way. He is the founder and CEO of Third Element Aviation (3EA), a drone startup from Bielefeld that specializes in delivery drones in the B2B sector. At the end of February, 3EA’s drones launched their first commercial deliveries. They are now being used in Lüdenscheid: the drones swarm up to 80 times a day to deliver parts that customers order at short notice from the materials trade Koerschulte, with which 3EA cooperates.
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3EA and Koerschulte are already solving a very acute problem in the region: Since the Rahmedetal Bridge in Lüdenscheid was initially closed in 2021 due to damage and then blown up in May 2023, there has been chaos there. About traffic jams, slow delivery traffic, migration of skilled workers and loss of sales For example, the Tagesschau reported. Where delivery trucks sometimes spend hours on the road – partly because of traffic jams – 3EA’s drones only need a few minutes.
3EA’s drones already transport material deliveries up to 80 times a day. 3EA
Delivery by drone as a service, thanks to partner Koerschulte
Third Element Aviation is actually a spin-off from a special machinery company that employed Marius Schröder and other team members from 3EA until it was bought by an investor in 2016 and relocated to the Rhineland. Schröder, who was already responsible for the drone area, decided together with five other colleagues to simply pick up where they left off. At the beginning of 2017, they founded the GmbH and built the company primarily with the help of outside capital and what they earned from developing and selling drones for all kinds of purposes.
3EA now has around 30 employees. Four of the five people who built the company together with Schröder are still there today, says the CEO. In addition, 3EA has been profitable for the third year. In the future, the startup wants to tap into a gap in the market with its delivery drones. 3EA primarily wants to sell the delivery drones for this purpose. Companies that just want to rent the drones for their deliveries can contact partner Koerschulte. “It’s a win-win situation for us because we can cover both options but stay with our core business of developing and building delivery drones,” says Schröder.
The delivery drone market has potential
In fact, 3EA and Koerschulte are the first to set up a commercial B2B regular delivery operation via drone in Germany. Competition comes from Darmstadt with Wingcopter. The startup has been using its delivery drone “ Liefermichel ” since autumn 2023 to deliver food, hygiene and office supplies or even individual products from the hardware store to end consumers in the Odenwald region. The Wingcopter drones have been traveling in various African countries for several years, for example to bring medicine to remote places.
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What is crucial for drone startups is, among other things, what capacities they can offer their customers. The 3EA drones currently manage to transport a load of 6.5 kilograms, but will soon be upgraded to deliver ten kilograms, says Schröder. That is definitely enough for short-term deliveries. Together with a university, the startup determined that around 80 percent of the subsequent deliveries were plastic boxes containing around five kilograms of material, says Schröder.
Although 3EA’s delivery drones are high-tech, the delivery costs should remain affordable. “The bottom line is that a drone delivery shouldn’t cost more than a van delivery,” says Schröder. In the end, delivery by drone should not only save companies time, but also personnel. The drones are largely autonomous, which means that one person can at least monitor several drones at the same time, while a delivery truck always needs its own driver.
Persistence pays off
3EA waited around 2.5 years for approval for commercial scheduled flight operations. “But that definitely doesn’t mean that we have to wait so long for approval for every new route,” says Schröder. This was mainly due to the fact that delivery drones in this category are still new to the aviation authority – so the corresponding procedure had to be initiated and developed from scratch. Above all, risk assessment plays a major role. On the one hand, the routes should ideally not lead through places where large crowds of people are traveling unprotected, explains Schröder. But developers also have to take precautions in the event that a drone crashes – wherever. For example, 3EA’s delivery drones are equipped with a small parachute that allows for a soft landing.
Schröder says that five additional domestic routes are already being approved by the Federal Aviation Office. “And the next step will be to other countries.” Denmark and Italy, for example, are already on the list.
This completes the circle for 3EA. Many drone startups have given up in recent years – also because the bureaucratic effort was immense and it was not clear whether drones were really needed in people’s everyday lives. Flying taxis, which are also just large drones, still have to struggle with crucial steps in development in order to actually transport people at some point. It is still unclear whether this will happen in the foreseeable future. But by relying on B2B delivery drones, 3EA seems to have hit a nerve. According to Schröder, 3EA has already received inquiries from “hundreds of dealers” who want to use the drones. The CEO is confident that the worst is over: “We knew that at some point we would get the damn stamps on our approval applications and then it would all be worth it.” Now we can really get started.
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