Here’s the kind of funding news that actually makes sense when you read it twice. MAKO, a Sydney startup, just raised $28 million. Not for an app. Not for another AI wrapper. For a film that sticks to the side of an airplane and makes it burn less fuel. Simple idea. Hard execution. That’s usually how the good ones go.
What Is MAKO and What Does It Do?
MAKO is an aerospace company out of Sydney, founded back in 2015 by Henry Bilinsky, who still runs the show as CEO. The product is called Flightfilm. It’s an adhesive coating, micro-engineered to copy the texture of shark skin, applied straight onto an aircraft’s surface to cut aerodynamic drag.
The reality is, most people don’t think about drag. They think about legroom and snack carts. But drag is the silent tax every airline pays on every single flight, and it adds up fast. MAKO built a business around shaving that down.
The company used to go by a different name, MicroTau, before rebranding to MAKO. And it hasn’t just been chasing commercial airlines either. It’s working with defense clients too. So this isn’t a one-customer bet. It’s a platform play across two very different buyers with very different procurement timelines.
MAKO Raises $28 Million in Series A Funding
So here’s the headline. MAKO raised $28 million in a Series A round. According to International Airlines Group’s own announcement, the figure was actually AU$28 million, which works out to roughly US$20 million. Worth knowing if you’re comparing it against other raises priced in US dollars.
Let’s be honest, the use of funds here is not glamorous. It’s regulatory approval. In Australia, Europe, and the United States, all three at once. That’s expensive, slow, and unsexy. But it’s also exactly what a hardware company at this stage needs to be spending money on, because none of the manufacturing matters if the product can’t legally go on a plane.
The capital is also going toward actually building Flightfilm for the pre-orders MAKO already has lined up from commercial airlines and defense customers. And here’s the kicker: this $28 million round landed just three months after MAKO picked up a separate $3.07 million grant from the Australian government’s Industry Growth Program, earmarked for roll-to-roll manufacturing equipment and certification work. Two funding events, three months apart. That’s momentum, not luck.
Who Invested in MAKO’s Funding Round?
Virescent Ventures led the round. They’re a climate tech VC backed by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and they were already an investor in MAKO before this raise, so this is a case of conviction deepening rather than a brand-new bet.
The round wasn’t a solo act though. International Airlines Group joined in through its venture arm, IAGi. Grok Ventures came in. So did Skip Capital, IP Group, Zero Infinity Partners, and TreeArc. That’s a long list, and a varied one, mixing climate-focused funds with a strategic airline investor.
Blair Pritchard, a partner at Virescent, said MAKO has the potential to be the biggest Australian aviation story since Qantas. Big claim. But when one of the world’s major airline groups puts its own venture capital behind your tech, people start to listen. IAG has already said it plans to test Flightfilm on its own aircraft. That’s not just a check being written. That’s a customer showing up early.
What Is Flightfilm Technology?
Flightfilm is the whole reason MAKO raised $28 million in the first place, so it’s worth slowing down here. It’s a film, applied to the outside of an aircraft, engineered at a micro level to mimic shark skin texture. That riblet pattern smooths the airflow moving over the fuselage, which lowers drag during flight.
Here’s what makes it practical and not just clever: it doesn’t require any external structural changes to the aircraft. No redesign. No rebuild. Just a surface application. That’s a much easier sell to an airline than asking them to retire a fleet early or retrofit the airframe itself.
But it’s not done yet. Before Flightfilm can be sold and installed commercially, it needs to pass certification and earn a Supplemental Type Certificate from aviation regulators. That’s the bottleneck. That’s also exactly where this new $28 million is being pointed, across Australia, Europe, and the US simultaneously.
How Does Flightfilm Reduce Aircraft Fuel Costs?
The number MAKO is putting out there is up to a 4 percent reduction in fuel burn. On a single flight, that might sound small. Across an entire fleet, over an entire year, it stops sounding small very quickly. Fuel is one of the largest line items on an airline’s budget, full stop.
And the timing matters. The industry is dealing with a real fuel shock right now, which means route cuts, fare hikes, and surcharges getting passed straight to passengers. Henry Bilinsky has framed Flightfilm as the kind of efficiency play airlines need in exactly this kind of environment.
It’s also worth being straight about the competitive picture. There’s a comparable technology already in the market called aeroSHARK, built by Lufthansa Technik and BASF. It claims around a 1 percent fuel saving and it’s already flying commercially on Lufthansa Group aircraft, All Nippon Airways, and LATAM. So MAKO isn’t entering an empty field. It’s entering a field where a competitor already has planes in the air, but with a technology that claims a meaningfully bigger efficiency number, assuming it clears certification.
MAKO’s Journey From MicroTau to Today
Before it was MAKO, it was MicroTau. Back in 2022, under that name, the company raised a $5.6 million seed round led by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. ACTAI Ventures was in that round too, the firm founded by Bill Tai, who’s also known as an early Canva investor. Small world, that one.
That seed money is what let the team validate the core drag-reduction technology before the rebrand and before the push toward commercial scale. And the company didn’t sit still after that. It built a relationship with Delta Air Lines through Delta’s Sustainable Skies Lab. It ran flight testing with the US Air Force on a C-130J Super Hercules.
So this wasn’t an overnight story. It’s eleven years of building, four years removed from a $5.6 million seed check, now standing on a $28 million Series A. That’s the kind of trajectory that looks fast from the outside and feels painfully slow from the inside. Most real hardware companies feel exactly like that.
What’s Next for MAKO After This Funding?
The near-term plan is certification, full stop. Australia, Europe, the US. All at once, because the customers are already lined up and waiting on the paperwork, not the product.
MAKO says it’s flight-proven and manufacturing-ready, with commercial and defense customers already committed once certification clears. There’s also testing planned with a handful of unnamed airlines across Asia-Pacific, plus IAG’s own planned trials on its fleet.
On the manufacturing side, the focus is scaling up the roll-to-roll production equipment that the earlier government grant helped fund. MAKO has been clear that it sees Flightfilm as something that complements other decarbonization efforts in aviation, not a silver bullet that replaces them. The near-term bet is squarely on cutting fuel burn across the planes already flying today, not waiting around for a new generation of aircraft to show up. And honestly, that’s the more grounded bet. The fleet that exists right now is the fleet that needs the fix right now.
Sources used in this article:
- Startup Daily – Drag reduction aerospace startup Mako takes off with $28 million Series A
- SmartCompany – MAKO raises $28 million for ‘shark skin’ aircraft technology
- AeroTime – IAG invests in MAKO’s shark skin aircraft technology
- Ground News – Drag reduction aerospace startup Mako takes off with $28 million Series A
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Hi Friends, This is Swapnil; I love reading and sharing knowledge. Currently working as a content writer at startupsunion.com. You all can hang out with me here.