GUTMA Board of Directors 2026
REINALDO NEGRON
Co-President (Wing)
Reinaldo is the Head of UTM for Wing, leading product development for Wing’s UTM application and service supporting Wing’s drone delivery and shared airspace globally. He has led extensive contributions to the global UTM ecosystem, including UTM integration activities in the United States, Australia, Europe, and the United Kingdom, including how UTM services can provide SORA mitigations reducing operator risk; global consensus standards development; and industry collaboration such as the InterUSS Platform, the US UTM Implementation, and more. Reinaldo brings the perspective of an operator, service provider and manufacturer, and engages regularly with a broad range of stakeholders including ICAO, CANSO, CAAs and ANSPs, federal and state, and local entities, law enforcement, and commercial UAS pilots and operators.
Sebastian Babiarz
Co-President (Skypuzzler)
Sebastian is the CCO of Skypuzzler, a Danish startup that provides digital air traffic control solutions. Additionally, Sebastian advises and collaborates with European regulators and standards organisations as they work to build regional regulatory frameworks to enable safe and scalable drone operations. With more than 16 years of business experience in the drone and telecom industry, Sebastian is passionate about new technology and automation and how they can improve lives. Sebastian is a co-founder, board member, and, since 2019, co-president of the Global UTM Association.
Kapil Mittal
Global Head of Digital Airspace at Ericsson
Kapil Mittal is a global leader in Digital Airspace and connected Aviation, currently serving as Global Head of Digital Airspace at Ericsson and Founder of Ericsson Drone Mobility. With over 20 years of international leadership experience, he works at the intersection of aviation, telecom and digital infrastructure, advancing the use of 4G/5G and emerging 6G technologies to enable Electronic Conspicuity, network-based identification, positioning, sensing and scalable U-space services. Kapil actively collaborates with regulators, standards bodies and industry stakeholders to support the evolution of Digital Airspace and Advanced Air Mobility. He serves as Co-Chair of the GSMA Drone Interest Group, advising the World Economic Forum AVIATE initiative, and contributes to international activities involving ICAO, the FAA, and EASA.
Thomas Neubauer
Co-founder and CEO of Dimetor.
Thomas Neubauer is Co-founder and CEO of Dimetor.
He has about 20 years of experience in the management of wireless networks. Among other innovations, Thomas is a co-creator and inventor of AirborneRF, a software solution specialized for connecting cellular network operators with aviation (ATM/UTM/FIMS) systems. On behalf of GSMA and GUTMA, Thomas is leading the “Interface for data exchange between Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and UTM ecosystem” Work Group of ACJA (Aerial Connectivity Joint Activity), since it was formed in 2019. As such he is focusing on global standardization of interfaces between cellular and unmanned aviation systems including 4G, 5G and satcom technologies. He holds a Ph.D. in telecommunications engineering from the Vienna University of Technology.
NEERAJ BANSAL
Head of UTM at HHLA SKY
Neeraj Bansal is a commercial leader with a 29-year record of building, scaling and internationalising technology businesses across telecom, logistics, digital, and drones and robotics. He leads UTM at HHLA Sky GmbH, a drone-operations and digital-airspace company in Hamburg, where he has built the UTM business and a drone-solutions portfolio spanning surveillance, inspection, security and transport, across civil and defence applications. Earlier, he grew Google’s advertising business in the Middle East and North Africa to over USD 250 million, was Chief Marketing Officer at Reliance Jio during a launch that reached 50 million subscribers in 100 days, established DHL’s Smart Trucking business, and led commercial functions at drone-delivery pioneer Wingcopter — across EMEA, MENA, APAC, India and the US. At HHLA Sky he has supported real-world UTM programmes in Germany, Denmark and Switzerland, including BLU-Space, GENIUS (Odense) and the FOCA U-space trials. Having started at Ericsson as 3GPP mobile standards took shape, he advocates comparable global harmonisation of UTM standards. As a GUTMA Board member, Neeraj focuses on the commercial foundations of UTM — the business models and cross-regional alignment needed to make the sector commercially self-sustaining.
emanuele “manu” lubrano
Digital Transformation Architect at the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation (FOCA)
Manu leads the technical implementation of Zurich U-space at FOCA, coordinating digital airspace services with Skyguide and industrial counterparts. He brings a dual perspective to the GUTMA Board, combining his current regulatory role with over a decade of industry experience across the entire drone value chain: as a drone service provider, drone manufacturer and drone operator. He previously served on the GUTMA Board as CEO and Co-Founder of INVOLI, the airspace surveillance company he built and scaled across Europe, the US and Australia over eight years. Earlier, he was Head of Industrialization at senseFly and co-founded the humanitarian association Drones For Earth. He holds a PhD in Manufacturing Systems and Robotics from EPFL. A firm believer in the societal benefits of drones, and that interoperability cannot stop at borders, Manu is committed to simplifying U-space frameworks, accelerating practical adoption across Member States, and advancing global harmonization, always rooting for approaches that unblock the industry without compromising on safety.
Shinji Nakadai
Founder and CEO of Intent Exchange Inc
Shinji Nakadai is the Founder and CEO of Intent Exchange Inc. He researches on market mechanism and automated negotiation for UTM and SCM (Supply Chain Management). He was involved in DRESS Project, which is a national project on UTM in Japan, from 2017 to 2022. He proposed eNegotiation protocol for SCM in UN/CEFACT, and it was accepted and published in 2021.
He used to work on an auction mechanism for UTM, and now he is working on negotiation and audit mechanism. The motivation of these research topics is to achieve fair and efficient use of airspace.
He has expertise in machine learning, market mechanism, wireless technology, network protocols and distributed databases. In 2003, he received his master’s degree from Tokyo University and joined NEC. In 2012, he was at UC Berkeley as a visiting scholar. Currently, he is a research member of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), and he also works for BIRD INITIATIVE, Inc.
Hrishikesh Ballal
Founder and Managing Director of OpenUTM LTD.
Dr. Hrishikesh Ballal is the Founder and Managing Director of OpenUTM Ltd. He has extensive experience developing technologies, protocols, and interfaces in the context of secure drone operations and UTM. He is the Founder / Primary Technical Lead to well-established open-source projects in the context of UTM: Flight Blender + Flight Spotlight.
Dr. Ballal has expertise in building and managing complex engineering systems. Prior to his work in OpenUTM, he worked as a Systems Architect within the Microsoft Business Division and later as a Hardware Compliance Engineer in the Microsoft Devices Division. Prior to Microsoft, he worked in the automotive industry. In 2015, he completed his PhD in geodesign from the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London. He is a Mechanical Engineer by training with a specialization in Engineering Systems Design. His engineering background includes Masters degrees from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, USA and a Bachelors degree from Nagpur University in Nagpur, India.
Chris Lyons
Head of UTM at Zipline
Chris Lyons is the Head of UTM at Zipline, where he leads product development for Zipline’s UTM platform. Chris and his team enable safe, scalable, and interoperable drone operations for the largest autonomous delivery service on Earth. He leverages operational insights from 75 million autonomous flight miles across seven countries to build world-class UTM capabilities for scaled operations in shared airspace. Chris collaborates closely with global regulators, technical standards groups, the FAA, NASA, and the open-source community to operationalize key concepts and capabilities for the industry. Before joining Zipline, Chris held various product management leadership roles at Uber, General Electric, and Aurora, gaining diverse experiences across the mobility, autonomous vehicle, and IoT industries. He brings over 15 years of experience in commercializing nascent technologies with a proven track record of creating valuable products at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds. Chris looks forward to contributing as a Board member of GUTMA and is motivated to operationalize UTM as an enabler for the industry, promoting flexible standards for sustainable growth in the ecosystem.
Secretary General
Koen De Vos
senior drone expert since 2015
Koen De Vos retired from the European Commission in April 2020, after a long career spanning multiple policy domains. From 2015 onwards, he served as a senior drone expert. Before this, he worked on airport noise policy and was a member of the Single European Sky team between 2002 and 2009.
Koen joined the European Commission in 1993, initially focusing on social and employment issues. Before entering the Commission, he worked at the University of Antwerp and at the Higher Institute for Labour Studies in Leuven, Belgium.