Ballistic Recovery Systems Inc., the St. Paul company that supplies whole-aircraft parachutes to Cirrus Design Corp., announced late Monday that it will partner with CIMSA Ingenieria de Sistemas, a Spanish engineering firm known for its development of military and scientific products.
Besides providing additional expertise to BRS, CIMSA also agreed to invest $1.5 million in the company. For its part, BRS has issued CIMSA 1.1 million shares of its stock, as well as a purchase warrant for about 275,000 more shares.
BRS plans to use the additional money to cover research and development costs, build new manufacturing facilities and accelerate work on projects such as the whole-aircraft parachute it is developing for Diamond Aircraft's D-Jet and DA-50. BRS also could be tapped to produce a parachute system for another jet in development at Cirrus.
BRS CEO Larry Williams issued a statement regarding the partnership: "By combining the design and engineering skills of BRS and CIMSA, this creates a virtual dream team as we all speak the same technical language and our product development goals are extremely well aligned."
