$850 million investment in Springfield and Clark County will move Direct Aviation from concept to reality, creating nearly 2,000 jobs and supporting production of up to 800 EL9 Ultra Short aircraft per year

SPRINGFIELD, Ohio, July 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Electra today announced plans to establish its first production facility for the EL9 Ultra Short in the City of Springfield, within Clark County, a major milestone that will bring its nine-passenger hybrid-electric aircraft from development into scaled commercial production.

The $850 million investment will create 1,975 new jobs, anchor production of the EL9 Ultra Short, and help meet demand for Direct Aviation, a new category of accessible, point-to-point air mobility. The EL9 Ultra Short is a nine-passenger fixed-wing aircraft that uses hybrid-electric propulsion and blown-lift technology to take off and land in as little as 150 feet. The new facility will be located at AirPark Ohio, adjacent to Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport.

“Electra is opening a new era of aviation, one where flight is direct, accessible, and closer to the communities it serves,” said Marc Allen, CEO of Electra. “This agreement is the moment that our vision moves from demonstration into reality. In Springfield and Clark County, we found the rare combination this next era requires: a ready site, a skilled workforce, a deep aerospace and defense ecosystem, and state and local leaders with the commitment and vision to build it with us. We are grateful to the City of Springfield, Clark County, and the State of Ohio for welcoming Electra into this community as we prepare to bring the EL9 Ultra Short into production, through certification, and ultimately into service.”

The production facility will ensure Electra remains at the forefront of American global leadership in hybrid-electric aviation, with the EL9 Ultra Short unlocking new markets for commercial advanced air mobility, military logistics, and humanitarian applications. The decision to build in Springfield is a bet on reindustrializing America’s capacity to manufacture next-generation aircraft at scale in the Birthplace of Aviation.

“Ohio is where flight began, and the Dayton-Springfield area has become the national epicenter for advanced air mobility – the place where the next generation of aircraft is being designed, tested, and now built at scale,” said Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. “Electra’s decision to bring nearly 2,000 new jobs to Springfield will be transformative for Clark County, demonstrating Ohio’s unique ability to lead America into aviation’s next era.” 

Electra selected the site following a year-long competitive national site-selection process that evaluated more than 140 potential locations. Criteria included workforce availability, infrastructure readiness, long-term expansion capacity, state and local partnership, incentives, and proximity to the aerospace, defense, and advanced manufacturing talent needed to support EL9 Ultra Short production.

The new 96-acre facility will house production of the EL9 Ultra Short. The initial phase of development will start immediately with design, while construction of the facility will begin next year. The initial phase will support capacity for up to 400 aircraft per year. A second phase of development will expand capacity to up to 800 aircraft per year.

The company chose the Dayton-Springfield region because it offers advanced air mobility (AAM) companies a combination of assets found nowhere else in the country. Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport is home to the National Advanced Air Mobility Center of Excellence (NAAMCE) and SkyVision, the FAA-approved ground-based detect-and-avoid system that enables beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flight testing in unrestricted airspace, which allows companies to move from concept to flight test faster than anywhere else in the nation. That infrastructure is complemented by growing AAM production near Dayton International Airport and the region’s proximity to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), which together form one of the deepest concentrations of aerospace R&D talent in the world.

“JobsOhio and our partners at the Dayton Development Coalition are proud to welcome Electra’s first point-to-point hybrid-electric aircraft production facility to Ohio,” said JobsOhio President and CEO J.P. Nauseef. “This investment builds on years of collaboration to establish Springfield-Beckley Municipal Airport as a national hub for advanced air mobility. Here, Electra will have direct access to the nation’s premier AAM testing infrastructure, a proven aerospace workforce, a deep manufacturing supply chain and the unmatched research capabilities of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base—an ideal environment to innovate, scale and grow for decades to come.”

Electra’s investment will be supported by state and local incentives tied to job creation, workforce development, infrastructure readiness, and long-term manufacturing growth. An incentive package is being designed to support hundreds of new Ohio jobs over the coming years as Electra scales production in the region. The project will pursue a Job Creation Tax Credit from the Ohio Department of Development at a future Tax Credit Authority meeting. JobsOhio also plans to provide assistance with the project, which will be made public after a final agreement is executed.

The EL9 Ultra Short is designed to unlock Direct Aviation, a new category of air travel that connects people and places directly through point-to-point mobility using novel access points such as parking lots, barges, and sports fields. The aircraft is designed around Electra’s Rule of Six: access, quiet operations, payload, range, safety, and affordability. In 2025, the company secured $115 million in Series B funding to support pre-production and certification of the EL9 Ultra Short, led by Prysm Capital.

“This is a landmark moment for Electra and for aviation,” said Jay Park, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Prysm Capital. “Building a new category of aircraft takes conviction at every step, and the Electra team has delivered on each one. We’re proud to be their partner as the EL9 goes from proving what’s possible to producing it.”

In May, Electra released the Direct Aviation Market Outlook, a nationwide analysis of U.S.-based travel. At the heart of this market are trips between 50 and 250 flying miles, where demand is both concentrated and largely unserved by existing aviation. Electra’s analysis found that meeting this demand will require between 12,000 and 16,000 aircraft between 2030 and 2040.

This announcement follows Electra and Safran Helicopter Engines’ life-of-program agreement to develop and produce the TG600 turbogenerator that will power the EL9 Ultra Short. The agreement includes an initial order for 250 units and establishes Safran’s TG600 as the core of the EL9’s hybrid-electric propulsion system.

Earlier this year, Electra and Bristow Group Inc. announced a Pre-Delivery Payment agreement with non-refundable deposits and binding terms and conditions aligned to commercial aviation industry standards, subject to aircraft certification, securing the first delivery slot for the EL9 Ultra Short hybrid-electric aircraft with the TG600.

Electra has also submitted the EL9 Ultra Short aircraft to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) for Part 23 type certification and anticipates a first flight scheduled for late 2027 or early 2028. The FAA recently closed the G-1 Issue Paper, formally establishing the certification basis for Electra’s EL9 Ultra Short aircraft and advancing the company toward the next phase of type certification.

“The first era of aviation began right here in the greater Dayton region,” Allen said. “It is fitting that aviation’s next era will be built here too — in Springfield and Clark County — where Electra will produce groundbreaking aircraft designed to transform the way people travel.”

Electra will also continue to operate parts of its business from its Manassas, Virginia facilities. Together, the two campuses will give Electra the structure, talent, and operating model needed to fuel its next chapter of growth. To learn more, visit electra.aero/ohiojobs.

About Electra

Electra.aero, Inc. (Electra) is an advanced air mobility (AAM) company building hybrid-electric Ultra Short airplanes that deliver unprecedented performance advantages to fly people and cargo seamlessly without airports, emissions, or noise. With the EL9 Ultra Short, Electra is pioneering Direct Aviation, the next level of connectivity that brings air travel closer to where we live, work, and play. Electra’s Ultra Short technology delivers 2.5x the payload and 10x longer range with 70% lower operating costs than helicopters and eVTOLs with significantly greater safety and far less certification risk.

Electra’s team includes some of the most respected and successful entrepreneurs and engineers in novel aircraft design, with over 40 prior aircraft successfully developed and/or certified. Lockheed Martin Ventures, Honeywell, and Safran are among Electra’s strategic investors along with Prysm Capital, the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC), and other private investors. Electra’s contracted customers include the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and NASA along with over 2,200 letters of intent from 60+ commercial customers, including both airlines and helicopter operators.

About JobsOhio 
JobsOhio, Ohio’s private nonprofit economic development corporation, enhances company growth and personnel development through business attraction, retention, and expansion across 10 competitive industry sectors. With a team of seasoned professionals, JobsOhio utilizes a comprehensive network to foster talent production in targeted industries and attract talent through Find Your Ohio. Collaborating with seven regional partners, including Dayton Development Coalition, Lake to River Economic Development, Ohio Southeast Economic Development, One Columbus, REDI Cincinnati, Regional Growth Partnership, and Team NEO. JobsOhio delivers world-class customer service to provide companies with a competitive advantage. In 2026 Ohio was named CNBC’s Top State for Business. Learn more at www.jobsohio.com. Follow us on LinkedIn, X , Instagram, and Facebook. 

Media Contacts:

Matthew Bowen
Vrge Strategies
matthew@vrge.us 

Matt Englehart
Englehart@jobsOhio.com
614-300-1152

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SOURCE Electra.aero

Enterprises can now ship AI agents with the same governance, testing, and security they already trust for application code

SAN FRANCISCO, July 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Harness, the AI Software Delivery Platform™ company, today announced it is extending its platform to cover the full AI Agent Development Lifecycle (DLC), giving enterprises a single set of pipelines and controls to build, test, deploy, and run agents the same way they already ship everything else.

Every enterprise is building AI agents, but most can’t get them past internal pilots or proofs of concept. According to Gartner®, “Only 8% of organizations have agentic AI in production.” The software delivery lifecycle enterprises trust for shipping application code hasn’t extended to agents yet, trapping the ROI of internal AI investments. Real innovation arrives once a company can run an agent live with the same trust and confidence it has in the rest of its software.

“When we started Harness, the vision was a safety harness for code,” said Jyoti Bansal, co-founder and CEO of Harness. “Until recently, that meant application code. Today it also means agentic code, written across engineering, product, sales, and support teams alike, each building agents for their own workflows. Everything you’ve done for software delivery over the last decade — governance, orchestration, security, testing — you can now do for agents in the same platform.”

Why AI agents break the traditional software delivery lifecycle

Traditional software works because it’s predictable. Application code is deterministic. Run the same test against the same code twice, and it produces the same result both times.

Agents don’t work that way: an agent’s underlying language model decides how to complete a task, and the same agent, given the same input, can choose a different tool or take a different action from one run to the next. A test that passes once offers no guarantee it will pass the next time. Incidents stop being reproducible on demand, which means the standard playbook for catching and fixing bugs doesn’t transfer either.

The stakes rise with the size of the business. A rogue agent can expose customer data, violate a compliance policy, or take an action nobody approved. Enterprises need a way to answer for what their agents are doing, and the traditional software delivery lifecycle was never built to give them one.

New Harness Agent DLC products and capabilities

Agent DLC closes the gap between building an agent and delivering it safely to production. Today’s launch includes five new products and capabilities spanning testing, deployment, operations, and governance:

Harness AI Evals make agent quality measurable, letting teams define eval datasets, wire up scoring functions, and set quality gates that automatically catch regressions whenever an agent or model changes.Agent Deployments extend the canary releases, approvals, and OPA guardrails that Harness already applies to Kubernetes deployments to managed agent runtimes like Amazon Bedrock AgentCore and Google’s Agent Runtime. Agents now ship through existing pipelines instead of a separate cloud-specific workflow.AI Configs support the release and management of prompts and model changes at runtime, backed by the same feature flagging infrastructure that already manages code releases. Teams can test what performs best and roll back instantly, without redeploying.AI Asset Catalog automatically discovers every agent, skill, and plugin built across an organization’s repositories and links each to an owner, so nothing ships or runs unaccounted for.Harness AgentTrace records what happens during a single agent run and across a full multi-step session, showing which path an agent took, where it slowed down, and how different models or prompts affect the outcome. Harness is also open-sourcing the foundational components behind AgentTrace, including harness-sdk and harness-evals, so developers can bring the same tracing primitives into their own AI applications.

In addition, existing Harness products already extend to agents without requiring any changes: Continuous Integration builds them like any other service, Artifact Registry tracks their versions and dependencies, AI Test Automation validates their responses in plain English criteria, and AI Cost Management extends spend visibility to every agent and model.

Securing the Agent DLC

Agents choose their own approach and path to get there, so their behavior is hard to predict and just as hard to secure. They expand their own attack surface by connecting to tools and APIs, spawning sub-agents, and inheriting trust from every model they touch. Static scans were never designed for this kind of risk. Harness is launching new security capabilities to close that gap.

Shift-left: constrain what agents can do before they ship.

Primitive Scanning flags misconfigurations in agent skills, prompts, and models.AIBOM captures every model, tool, and dependency an agent was built with.AI Testing runs agents against adversarial inputs and the OWASP Top 10 for LLMs.

Shield-right: enforce policy and maintain visibility once they’re live.

Agent Discovery and Posture Management continuously surfaces agents as they’re invoked, maps how they connect and orchestrate work, and assesses their posture across the organization.AI Firewall enforces policy in real time against prompt injection, tool misuse, and data exfiltration.

Together, these capabilities give Agent DLC a single audit trail from development to production.

Built on the Harness platform

Harness built context and intelligence directly into the platform with the Software Delivery Knowledge Graph, which captures and connects data from every stage of the delivery lifecycle, now spanning both applications and agents. Organizations relying on siloed tools don’t have that same connected view.

In June 2026, Harness introduced Autonomous Worker Agents, a platform for building and safely running AI agents inside software delivery pipelines. Worker Agents run as governed steps within those pipelines, covered by the same controls Harness already applies to every deployment.

Agent DLC extends that same context and governance across the full agent lifecycle. The pipelines, policies, approvals, and evidence that already apply to an organization’s code now apply to its agents too, so eval gates, deployment approvals, and security checks run as stages within a single pipeline, from the moment an agent is created through everything it does afterward.

Availability

Harness Agent DLC capabilities are rolling out now to Harness customers. For a full breakdown of what’s included at each stage of the lifecycle, visit https://www.harness.io/blog/introducing-harness-agent-dlc.

Gartner, Emerging Market Quadrant for AI Agent Development Platforms — Established Vendors, 8 June 2026. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates

About Harness

Harness is the AI Software Delivery Platform™ company, enabling engineering teams to build, test, and deliver software faster and more securely. Powered by Harness AI and the Software Delivery Knowledge Graph, the platform brings intelligent automation to every stage of the software delivery lifecycle after code — removing toil and freeing developers from manual, repetitive work. Companies like United Airlines, Morningstar, and Choice Hotels use Harness to accelerate releases by up to 75%, cut cloud costs by 60%, and achieve 10x efficiency across DevOps. Based in San Francisco, Harness is backed by Goldman Sachs, Menlo Ventures, IVP, Unusual Ventures, and Citi Ventures.

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SOURCE Harness

Delray Beach company demonstrates hydrogen energy platforms built to address Florida’s hurricane recovery, infrastructure growth, and data center demand

DELRAY BEACH, Fla., July 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — VIVIFY Technology today welcomed Florida Governor Candidate Byron Donalds to the company’s South Florida headquarters for a firsthand demonstration of its deployed hydrogen energy platforms: the HOG™ (Hydrogen Oxygen Generator), the CAT™ (Clean Air Technology) emissions control system, and the Flying Pig™, VIVIFY’s 1MW containerized hydrogen power unit.

The visit focused on the direct applications of VIVIFY’s technology to Florida’s most pressing infrastructure challenges: disaster recovery and hurricane resilience, power capacity for the state’s rapidly growing communities, and dedicated behind-the-meter energy for the data center build-out accelerating across the state.

The Flying Pig™ — a self-contained, 1MW hydrogen power system engineered for rapid deployment — is designed to be transported and operational within hours of arriving on site. In a post-storm environment, that means restoring critical power to Florida communities without waiting on grid repair timelines that can stretch for days or weeks.

“We didn’t build VIVIFY in Florida by accident,” said Jason Herring, Founder and CEO of VIVIFY Technology. “Hurricane season, the data center boom, communities being built faster than the grid can reach them: these are Florida realities. We built the answer here because the problem is here.”

Florida’s population growth has created compounding pressure on transmission infrastructure. New master-planned communities, industrial corridors, and data center campuses across the state are running into the same constraint: available grid capacity cannot keep pace with announced development. VIVIFY’s on-site hydrogen energy systems are engineered to close that gap, delivering dedicated power on the developer’s schedule rather than the utility’s.

“Every new community, every new data center, every growth corridor in this state runs into the same wall,” Herring said. “The grid can’t keep up. We built the technology that lets Florida build without waiting.”

Candidate Donalds toured the facility and engaged directly with VIVIFY’s engineering team and deployed systems.

“Hurricane recovery, new community development, the data center wave: these are the issues that define Florida’s future,” Candidate Donalds said. “The technology I saw today addresses every one of them.”

About VIVIFY Technology

VIVIFY Technology is a hydrogen energy company headquartered in South Florida. The company designs and develops hydrogen-based energy platforms — including its flagship Hydrogen Oxygen Generator™ (HOG™), the Clean Air Technology™ (CAT™) emissions control system, and the Flying Pig™ containerized power unit — engineered to deliver dependable, dedicated power for the most demanding infrastructure environments in operation today. Learn more at vivify-technology.com.

Forward-Looking Statements: This release contains forward-looking statements regarding VIVIFY Technology’s products, platforms, and intended performance. Forward-looking statements are subject to inherent uncertainty and reflect the company’s current expectations. Actual results may differ materially. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement except as required by law.

Media Contact
Ashley Stevenson, Chief Marketing Officer
ashley@vivify-technology.com

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SOURCE VIVIFY