FLYR | Highlights of 2021 and What 2022 has in Store
While the past 18 months dealt unprecedented disruption to the aviation industry, 2021 also became the year during which airlines recognized their need for an accelerated digital agenda to maximize efficiency, plan with confidence, improve their agility, and create more alignment between different commercial teams.
At FLYR, our objective has always been to enable such agility and confidence for commercial decision-makers, spanning from analysts to commercial leaders that seek to align revenue management, capacity planning, and marketing teams.
For us, 2021 was a year of rapid growth as our vision rapidly aligned to that of airlines around the world, culminating with the demonstrations of our technology and its results at the World Aviation Festival in December.
Here’s to the Mavericks
Our origins sit with a small team that simply wondered what would become possible if cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence were applied to airline pricing and forecasting. Back then, we were a maverick group of technologists with grand ambitions. Now, our crew is on track to reach 300 strong in 2022 with a presence across the US, Europe, Middle East, and Asia.
These days, we are fortunate to also count among our crew many former airline operators and revenue management experts that recognized the need for change, becoming mavericks in their own right by driving positive change in an industry they’ve known for decades.
Some examples of such industry veterans are Rob Haun driving customer deployments, Jon Ham driving continuous performance improvement, Kyle Holden assuring customer adoption and confidence, Kartik Yellepeddi letting science lead the way, Dennis Michon aligning 15+ product teams, Niels Colémont enabling our ancillary optimization, and Matt, Dominic, Clayton, and Jan carrying the torch to airlines in need!
Interested to join our Maverick crew? Find the latest opportunities here.
Great Backers for Great Ambitions
Notable in 2021 was our $150M Series C capital raise led by Laurence Tosi’s WestCap, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s WndrCo, Silver Lake, Peter Thiel, JetBlue, and others. We were fortunate to welcome WestCap’s Will Cunningham to our board of directors, jointly focused on a deep partnership between WestCap and our teams.
The fundraise makes for one of the largest private investments in the area of revenue management, forecasting, and airline business intelligence. With it, we can place big, bold bets and reduce time to value for our airline partners.
Other examples of our growth ambition can be found in the rapid succession of acquisitions such as Faredirect to expand our ancillary offerings, xCheck to closely interconnect revenue management and marketing tools, and Bonanza to enable real-time, dynamic offer management.
Our Alliance with Air New Zealand
At this year’s World Aviation Festival in London, a contingency of FLYR crew members provided over 2000 attendees with live demonstrations of our product, user interface, implementation processes, analytics, and change management infrastructure.
The event was the perfect platform to announce our strategic alliance with Air New Zealand, which will see us working together to collaboratively develop advanced AI-based applications that utilize our Cirrus™ software platform. The alliance marked an expansion of the relationship between Air New Zealand and FLYR which began in 2020.
Looking ahead to 2022, the collaboration with Air New Zealand will see co-located teams out of Air New Zealand’s headquarters in Auckland, also forming the blueprint for similar alliances in the works with other FLYR customers. After all, we consider ourselves a partner first, and a vendor second.
The Revenue Operating SystemTM
Planning throughout their cautiously optimistic recovery, airlines are announcing new routes, migrating capacity at a rapid pace, launching new ancillary offerings, and reevaluating their distribution strategies.
In an environment exemplified by volatility, the need for a Revenue Operating SystemTM is more critical than ever, aligning all commercial teams and their decisions around the best pricing technologies and common ground truth. To that end, we are committed to deploying our own capital in helping airlines adopt our technology at a rapid pace and plan for a bright future without delay.
We thank our airline partners for their trust in us and for serving as our product’s brain trust, our investors to support our bold vision for the future, and most importantly, our FLYR crew for living and breathing the change we believe in.
Author:
Alex Mans, Founder & CEO of FLYR
