Sharks spent millions of years evolving skin that slips through water. A Sydney team turned that texture into a film you can stick on a plane.
The product
Shark skin is not smooth. It is covered in tiny grooves that cut drag. MAKO, formerly called MicroTau, prints that kind of texture into an adhesive film called Flightfilm. It goes onto an aircraft during scheduled maintenance. No redesign, no new engines, no structural changes.
The numbers
MAKO says Flightfilm can cut drag and fuel burn by up to 4% per aircraft. For an airline, fuel is one of the biggest costs on the books, so a few percent across a fleet is real money and real carbon.
The proof
- Flight tested on a US Air Force C-130J Super Hercules
- Delta is a commercial partner through its Sustainable Skies Lab
- A pilot with Vueling is planned later this year
The raise
At the end of June MAKO raised A$28M in a Series A led by existing investor Virescent Ventures. IAG, the parent of British Airways, Iberia and Vueling, came in, along with Grok Ventures and Skip Capital (the family offices of Atlassian co-founders Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar), plus IP Group, Zero Infinity Partners and TreeArc.
Virescent partner Blair Pritchard told Startup Daily MAKO “has the potential to be the biggest Australian aviation story since Qantas”. Before this round it had a $5.6M seed in 2022 and a federal Industry Growth Program grant of about $3M.
My read
The biggest efficiency wins in aviation are not coming from new planes. They are coming from making the planes already flying a bit better. Retrofit beats rebuild, and this one gets exported from Sydney.