One of the Fake Drone Companies Keith Wasserman Backs

Natilus, for all your 100-ton seaplane cargo drone needs

Keith Wasserman in conversation with Moses Kagan, via YouTube screenshot

Keith Wasserman is a nice guy. A criminal, but a nice guy.

The poor fellow’s mansion in Pacific Palisades burned down in the recent LA fires, but not before he sent out a widely-mocked tweet offering to pay any amount to private firefighters who might save it. Unfortunately, the Crassus of Los Angeles was not on hand.

Wasserman is a typical real estate hustler who is getting above his station. For some reason he’s in the venture business, probably because slumlords don’t get pussy.

One of the companies Gelt Venture Capital, an arm of Gelt Venture Partners, backs is Natilus, a cargo drone company that’s been around for years but only ostensibly had its first flight in 2023. This is clearly a fake company.

Here is their advisory board:

Chris Stewart, the former congressman, is a Mormon.

If you look at the co-founders, Anatoly Starikov goes by several different names, calling himself Anatoly Star in various official capacities including on his website:

And then using his real name on LinkedIn:

You’ll notice these are both Eastern Europeans, and one of Natilus’s first backers was Tim Draper, about whom there are some unanswered Russian questions. So again, the pattern here is Russians, Jews, and Mormons working on fake companies.

The concept of Natilus is freight transport drones. This is almost certainly unworkable at scale, but it’s a good thing to talk about if we don’t care about fixing our ports.

They claim to have nearly $7 billion in purchase commitments for more than 460 aircraft, to start deliveries in 2025, or maybe 2026, but there has not been a test of an at-scale prototype. The best they’ve got now is a sub-scale prototype video of the smallest cargo drone they advertise. In other words, their only successful test is of a smaller version of a drone they claim will carry a 3.8 ton payload, and yet they’re advertising another one that will carry a 100 ton payload.

Yet late last year they debuted a concept to compete in the commercial aviation market. They have no full-scale model, but that didn’t stop them from getting great press in CNN:

Natilus, which was founded in 2016, had previously announced a cargo-only, pilotless plane called Kona that also uses the same innovative shape. Matyushev says the blended wing body design originated in the 1990s from McDonnell Douglas, a major American aerospace manufacturer that merged with Boeing in 1997. Boeing never commercialized a blended wing plane, but studied the concept and produced an unmanned prototype, the X-48.

According to Natilus, Kona has received 400 orders and a full-scale model will be built and flown within the next two years. Much of the technology will then transfer to Horizon, which will have a regular cockpit and crew and, according to Matyushev, will enter service by 2030 — a hugely ambitious target, as it would be unprecedented for a brand-new aircraft to go from design to full certification in just six years.

One of these orders comes from the Founders Fund-backed Flexport.

Here’s how the concept was explained in Smithsonian Magazine in 2017:

While many drones are designed to basic specifications and only find their purpose later, Natilus is being built for a particular niche market. Today there are only two trans-oceanic shipping methods: Airplanes, which are very fast but very expensive, and ships, which are slow but cost pennies on the dollar by comparison. Natilus thinks it’s found a logistical “sweet spot” that balances speed with volume and weight of cargo with cost; the drones they hope to build could carry up to 200,000 pounds of cargo per flight. The company hopes to carve a lucrative new niche from the cargo markets: Shipping time-sensitive freight that isn’t valuable enough to fly on cargo airplanes, but is more valuable than much of what’s shipped by sea.

The concept that meets that niche is probably the very steampunk zeppelin. But the point is the company has been around for nearly a decade and all they have is a sub-scale prototype.

Another 2017 article in Fast Company says they planned to have drones in the air by 2020, which doesn’t seem to have happened:

That’s the thinking behind Natilus, a Richmond, California-based startup that this summer plans on flying FAA-approved tests of a 30-foot prototype that’s about the size and weight of a military Predator drone. The flight will mark the first significant step toward upending the global freight forwarding industry. Eventually, CEO Aleksey Matyushev says, the company hopes to fly the prototype on 30-hour test runs, carrying up to 700 pounds of cargo, between Los Angeles and Hawaii.

If a company advertising seaplane drones with 100-ton payloads crossing the Pacific sounds fake, that’s because it probably is.