Dwight Cox, CEO of Air Refueling Tanker Transport
“We’re doing a crowdfunding campaign… looking for $1,070,000 based on a $124 million valuation – based on our own assessment,” Air Refueling Tanker Transport CEO Dwight Cox told the 4thEst8. “We think we’ll be worth $44 billion by 2027.”
Cox says the campaign will fire-up as soon as the S.E.C. gives it’s blessing. Probably in the next few weeks. The company also partnered with Esri to incorporate national geospatial data to its refueling system.
Back in August 2020 the 4thEst8 reported how American companies that sell military aircraft to our allies need help delivering their product over great distances, as well as bringing that hardware back for servicing. Air-to-air refueling is key to this activity, and has historically been done by the military and a foreign company based in Ireland. A report by Bloomberg from mid-2019 says air-to-air refueling will be a $692 billion commercial market by 2025, with a 4 percent annual growth rate.
Photo courtesy of Archive.org
Cox said several RFI’s (requests for information) asking for a domestic commercial solution to this problem have gone unanswered and that Congress also earmarked $1 billion in the National Defense Authorization Act 2021 for this type of service. Getting a Navy contract, at the time, was part of his plan to prove MVP but now “We are looking at being a D.O.D. service provider. We’re looking to be a UPS or FedEx of air refueling… much bigger than that… We are going to get that (Navy) contract but our goal is much bigger.”
ART2 is headquartered in T-Rex, downtown St. Louis. Cox is a member of the ITEN tech incubator and is the only full-time employee of the company he founded in 2011 (after a career in the military).
