Wingtra Brand Guidelines: The ETH Zurich Spin-Off Behind the WingtraOne Tail-Sitter

A student project in a Zurich robotics lab.

Wingtra began as a research project at the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH Zurich, the Swiss federal institute of technology, under Professor Roland Siegwart. English Wikipedia says work on the aircraft started in 2013 under the name “PacFlyer,” as one of the university’s “Focus Projects,” in which engineering students build a working machine together. In an interview with the surveying magazine GIM International in August 2018, the chief executive Maximilian Boosfeld said the project had been run by Basil Weibel and Sebastian Verling, and that the two of them, Elias Kleimann and he were the four founders of the company.

Sources give two founding years. GIM International wrote in 2018 that Wingtra was founded in 2016 as a spin-off of the lab, and the Swiss startup network Venturelab wrote in September 2020 that Boosfeld and Weibel launched Wingtra AG as an ETH spin-off with Kleimann in 2016. The company’s own press text in 2025 gave 2017, which Venturelab gives as the year the first series-produced drone was sold.

The early milestones came quickly. English Wikipedia says a prototype was shown at the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover in March 2016, that the WingtraOne won the Swiss Excellence Product Award that year, and that it entered series production in 2017. In October 2017 Wingtra began working with Pix4D, the Swiss photogrammetry software company, so that customers could process their images into maps and 3D models. The company says it was named seventh in the Swiss TOP 100 startup ranking in 2018, and Venturelab reported that it placed second in 2020.

A tail-sitter built around the camera.

The WingtraOne is a tail-sitter. English Wikipedia describes a flying-wing aircraft with two electric motors that stands on its wing and tail fins, takes off vertically and then tilts forward to fly like an aeroplane. The hard part, the article says, was control during that change from hovering to forward flight; the flight controller and the transition algorithm were developed by 2016, and the design was reworked that year to cope better with wind.

Boosfeld explained the thinking to GIM International in 2018. A drone that takes off and lands vertically needs no runway, so it can work from awkward places; one Australian customer, he said, flew it from a boat to study dugongs. It also lands upright rather than on its belly, as many fixed-wing mapping drones do, so the camera is never in contact with the ground. At the time Wingtra offered Sony full-frame and compact cameras and a MicaSense multispectral sensor as swappable payloads, planned through a tablet app called WingtraPilot.

The users were surveyors, miners, builders and researchers. English Wikipedia lists aerial surveying, agriculture and glacier monitoring, along with trials of light deliveries to rural areas, and Venturelab wrote in 2020 that more than 1,000 drones had been sold and were in use in 71 countries, in mining, construction, research, agriculture and urban planning.

In July 2025 a successor arrived, the WingtraRAY. DroneLife reported on 10 July 2025 that it carries six survey payloads, including lidar and a high-resolution inspection camera, and has an optional parachute add-on that the publication said was approved for category 3 operations over people across most of US territory and supports C6 certification in Europe. It went on sale in selected countries that day, with a wider rollout planned for October 2025, and DroneLife added that it appears on the AUVSI Green and DIU Blue lists used for US government work.

Design and documentation.

Commercial drone makers sell instruments, not toys, and their pictures show it. The aircraft usually appear in the field rather than in a studio: a fixed-wing or vertical take-off airframe, often in white with a bright orange or another high-visibility colour, standing on gravel at a quarry edge, on a farm track or beside a pipeline before launch. The landscape matters as much as the machine, because the product being sold is the map, the model or the measurement that comes back.

Inspection and delivery makers have their own set pieces. Caged inspection drones are photographed inside boiler rooms, tanks, sewers and mines, lit only by their own lamps, with the protective frame as the defining shape. Delivery companies show a parcel being lowered on a line or dropped by a small parachute into a garden, a hospital yard or a field, so that the service, rather than the aircraft, carries the story.

People appear mainly as operators. A typical scene is a field crew in high-visibility clothing holding a tablet or a ground station, planning a flight or checking images on screen, with the drone small in the background. Brochures and websites follow the same order: the industry first, such as surveying, construction, mining, agriculture or public safety, then the workflow, then the hardware, with software screenshots and sample maps placed beside the aircraft.

Much of the industry still meets in person. Trade fairs such as Commercial UAV Expo and XPONENTIAL bring makers, software firms and operators to the same exhibition halls, where stands show airframes on plinths next to large screens of point clouds and orthophotos. In this guide we record what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and what it says about where its products are made — and mark clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Designed and assembled in Zurich, the company says.

Wingtra has grown on venture funding. Its news page lists a Series A round announced in May 2019 and a further round in March 2023, and in September 2024 the appointment of an independent board member. Boosfeld remains chief executive and Kleimann is listed as a founder in charge of strategy and investor relations, the company says.

On manufacturing, Wingtra’s company page says engineering and manufacturing are based in Zurich, and that it “designs and assembles its hardware” there, with sales and support teams across the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Asia-Pacific region and an office in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It gives a team of about 125 people, more than 2,000 customers and more than 100 resellers. It places itself in a Swiss robotics and geospatial cluster alongside Leica Geosystems, Pix4D, Flyability and Auterion.

The range today is sold as one workflow: the WingtraRAY drone, interchangeable sensors for photographs, lidar and multispectral images, ground-correction options including WingtraGROUND, and the company’s own planning and processing software. The company frames its mission as making professional survey data easier to collect for teams with mixed levels of drone experience, and its website is built around industries — surveying, construction, mining, environmental monitoring, agriculture and US government agencies — rather than around the aircraft.

For a design guide, Wingtra shows how a university robotics project can become a survey instrument brand that sells a workflow rather than a flying machine. Compare senseFly, another Swiss mapping-drone name, and Delair, a French one. For this guide we use a navy, a cool grey and a field orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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