MUNICH, Germany, Wednesday 2nd September 2026: SunCubes, a deep-tech startup pioneering wireless energy transmission technology for unmanned aerial systems, has announced it is deploying Engineering AI tools from ai-native cloud simulation platform, SimScale. The company will use the technology to develop laser-based charging solutions that let drones and unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs) recharge in flight, or at remote stations, without physical contact.
Battery performance is a key bottleneck for the drone and UAV sector. McKinsey identifies battery and powertrain technology as a critical limiter to drone delivery range. And research on the suitability of drones and UAVs to monitor energy infrastructure also highlights range as a blocker for long-range pipeline and remote asset monitoring, such as offshore wind turbines. Currently, in agriculture use, large farms have to constantly swap drone batteries manually.
As the industry looks to almost double from $24.4 billion in 2025 to $52.1 billion in 2033 across energy, infrastructure, agriculture, logistics, construction and security, solving this challenge is mission critical. The development of SunCube’s in-flight charging technology will eliminate these range and endurance limitations that constrain today’s commercial and industrial drone deployments.
SunCubes’ engineering team is using SimScale’s cloud-native simulation platform, including its AI-powered agentic simulation capabilities, to support the design and validation of its UAV systems and wireless energy transfer hardware. Simulation is central to the company’s product development process, enabling the team to evaluate thermal, structural, and aerodynamic performance of its advanced drone architectures without the time and cost constraints of physical prototyping.
“Simulation is not a support function for us – it’s how we build,” says Davide Russo, Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Officer, SunCubes. “SimScale gives us the capability to run complex, multi-physics analysis on our UAV designs and energy transfer systems in the cloud, with AI that helps us set up and interpret simulations faster than ever. For a team our size, this means we’re not blocked by inadequate tools and can move at startup speed, which is critical to our success.”
“SunCubes represents a genuinely new frontier for engineering simulation,” says David Heiny, Co-Founder and CEO of SimScale. “Laser-based wireless charging for drones is one of the most technically demanding hardware challenges in the industry today, and seeing a team this focused on using AI-assisted simulation as a core design tool is exactly the future we’re building toward.”
