Abraham Karem poses in 2011 with a model of his garage-built Albatross drone, a precursor to the Predator, which paved the way for the widespread military adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles.The legendary ‘Dronefather’ Abraham Karem’s company Overair is running short on money and workers are out en masse, Forbes has learned.the early 1990s, Abraham Karem developed the Predator drone, a deadly aircraft that transformed modern warfare and birthed a market estimated to be $14 billion this year.
Overair, which was spun out of Karem’s primary company Karem Aircraft in 2019, is seeking to develop an electric-powered aircraft that takes off and lands vertically like a helicopter but otherwise flies like an airplane. Overair has touted Karem’s rotor technology as what will enable it to outperform dozens of other companies like publicly traded Joby and Archer that are attempting to build similar aircraft, with the aim of enabling lower-emission urban and regional commuting by air.
But an exodus from Overair appears to be under way. Two key executives posted on LinkedIn that they left the company at the beginning of February: Chief Commercial Officer Valerie Manning and Chief Financial Officer Thomas Whayne, an experienced dealmaker who was Overair’s five-passenger aircraft, dubbed Butterfly, has four tilting rotors with blades that are much larger than those of competitors. They’re designed to spin more slowly when hovering and cruising, courtesy of “optimum speed rotor” technology that varies the number of rotations per minute and the angle of individual blades that Abraham Karem developed over the past 30 years with Pentagon funding.