ePlane Joins Forces with TCS to develop scalable solutions

CIOTechOutlook Team | Thursday, 09 January 2025, 05:30 IST

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The ePlane Company—an electric flying taxi startup incubated at IIT Madras—has formed a strategic alliance with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to create scalable solutions for passenger and cargo transportation using e-planes. According to a senior official from ePlane, the partnership will concentrate on modelling the battery life cycle, estimating demand, and optimizing operations. The urban mobility startup is creating one of India’s pioneering electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, commonly known as air taxis.

As per Vishnu Ramakrishnan from the founders office at ePlane, it will utilize TCS's cutting-edge analytics, IoT, and AI-driven solutions to create the software ecosystem for air taxis.

“We’re sitting on a lot of data from the battery packs that we’ve put together ourselves. TCS has experience building models that forecast battery life cycle, which is critical because today, forecasting is fairly theoretical,” Ramakrishnan told ET. “We’re leveraging their expertise to accelerate how we model the life cycle of our battery packs.”

The tech giant will also help predict demand estimation based on metrics such as socioeconomic variables, traffic density, travel times, and corridors with heavy traffic, he said. “It supports how we set up vertiports and landing points. TCS’s work on route optimisation will help us here.”

The startup based in Chennai aims for May 2025 to conduct its prototype trials and anticipates performing sandbox trials by the end of 2026 with air ambulance applications.

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