Employees at Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk are working in secrecy in buildings next to Google in Mountain View, California. Larry Page was "The guy upstairs," or preferred to be called by his subordinates "Gus" is also Google co-founder.
Larry Page didn't want people to know he has been personally funding the pair of startups devoted to creating flying cars. Zee.Aero was created in 2010 with Page's investment of more than $100 million. And just last year, he then put money into another startup, named Kitty Hawk. CNBC reported.
Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk have been dedicated to developing designs for flying cars completely separate. They are actually competing against each other in the flying-car space. There are currently dozens of firms working on flying cars globally but these two are the closest realm of reality.
The secret was revealed in 2012 when a report of patents filings was discovered showing Zee.Aero was working on a small, all-electric plane with a thin central fuselage and twin rows of propellers like outriggers that could take off and land - or in short, flying cars. Zee.Aero now employs close to 150 people. Kitty Hawk, on the other hand, has been building its own that resembling a giant version of a quadcopter drone. - According to Bloomberg.
Zee.Aero has recruited engineers and aerospace designers from big organizations like Boeing NASA and SpaceX. The company has been conducting regular test flights of the two single-seater prototype designs operating at a nearby airport about a 70-minute drive south from Mountain View.
The Zee.Aero headquarters is located at 2700 Broderick Way. It is a 30,000-square-foot, two-story white building. While Kitty Hawk headquarters is a half-mile away from Zee's offices. Presently, Larry Page and Google have been declining to speak about Zee.Aero or Kitty Hawk.