- FLYR Labs is a company that helps transportation leaders unlock their highest potential. This is the story behind the company.
FLYR Labs is a pioneer of what is known as the Commercial Operating System – which is a platform that is focused on the relentless application of artificial intelligence technologies that help transportation leaders unlock their highest potential. And FLYR Labs’ vertically integrated platform brings data, forecasting, pricing, reporting, and simulation capabilities into a single pane of glass that informs and automates commercial-wide functions.
Plus, the company’s end-to-end platform is able to enable or automate all commercial decisions and e-commerce experiences, including those through its internet booking engine (IBE), offer management, customer messaging, customer management, and content management capabilities, thus resulting in improved revenue performance and digital customer satisfaction.
To learn more about the company, Pulse 2.0 interviewed FLYR Labs’ founder and CEO Alex Mans.
Alex Mans’ Background
Mans had grown up in The Netherlands and taught himself to write software around the age of 10. And ever since finishing high school, Mans has been building startups. In 2013, Mans moved to Silicon Valley and started working on what would eventually become FLYR.
How did the idea for FLYR Labs come together?
Mans said he was always fascinated with artificial intelligence and aviation. And he always wanted to start a company at the intersection of the two.
Upon starting FLYR, the team started with forecasting the price of airline tickets as a way to help consumers optimize the best time to purchase. And a few years later, they pivoted from B2C to B2B, becoming a revenue management solution for major airlines that helps with continuous pricing optimization and improve both the number of passengers carried as well as their revenues.
“Today, we’re a comprehensive platform that helps airlines and other travel companies inform and automate their commercial decisions, ranging from pricing to capacity planning, and from marketing spend allocation to forecasting financial performance,” said Mans in the interview.
What was the process of taking the idea for FLYR Labs to a full-fledged business?
Mans pointed out that the travel and transportation industry is not known to innovate quickly, let alone as it relates to mission-critical systems like revenue management and forecasting.
“Especially with such mission-critical systems, there’s no such thing as a minimum viable product as are often used for startups’ go-to-market strategy. Building a full-fledged suite of products took time and capital, followed by securing some of the world’s largest airlines as our customers. Now, we count JetBlue, Qatar Airways Cargo, Avianca, Air New Zealand, Azul, and many others among our customers,” added Mans.
What are FLYR Labs’ core products?
The FLYR platform is the foundation for the company’s Commercial Intelligence product. And FLYR developed this platform from a clean sheet of paper, avoiding all the legacy technology constraints airlines have sadly gotten accustomed to.
The company loads and manages its customers’ available commercial data and feeds it into a set of deep-learning algorithms to power forecasting, pricing, and simulation capabilities. And all data, KPIs, forecasts, and automation are subsequently made available in a single pane of glass for decision-makers.
On top of the platform sit 3 product suites:
1.) AI-driven Revenue Intelligence to forecast or automate pricing performance and to help unify commercial decisions across teams;
2.) Advanced Retailing and Fulfillment, which replaces complex and outdated inventory and order management processes; and
3.) Digital Customer Experiences to help airlines optimize what and how they sell across channels.
How has FLYR Labs’ technology evolved since launching?
Mans said that they expanded the platform in 2 important ways
1.) First with solutions that address the end-to-end commercial operations of an airline, allowing them to unlock their full value chain from customer experience to e-commerce and retailing.
2.) And second, with additional sub-verticals in travel and transportation. For example, they started to supply the platform and solutions to hotels.
After pivoting from consumer to B2B and the company started began working with airlines, it was not long before airlines became interested in adopting their AI-based forecasting technology and data platform that was already underpinning their revenue management solutions. Airlines wanted to use these underlying capabilities to drive other commercial decisions across their organization – from network and capacity planning to help them optimize their marketing spend.
The company had further accelerated the expansion of capabilities by making a few acquisitions, including xCheck for its marketing technology, FareDirect for optimizing ancillary products, Pribas for dynamic offer and order management capabilities, and Newshore for direct distribution and retailing capabilities. Lastly, the acquisition of Pace Revenue enabled them to rapidly bring commercial decision intelligence and pricing capabilities to hotel businesses around the world.
What have been some of FLYR Labs’ biggest milestones?
The biggest milestone has been the company’s rapid validation and market acceptance, leading them to signing dozens of customers in 2022. And to enable our growth and support the team, which went from 150 in 2021 to over 600 today, we opened new global offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Amsterdam, and Krakow.
Are there any specific customer success stories that you would like to share?
In the past 6 months, the company signed agreements with one of the leading airlines in Latin America, Avianca; Poland’s flag carrier, LOT Polish Airlines; Qatar Airways Cargo, one of the world’s leading international cargo carriers; Azul, Brazil’s largest airline; and Cyprus Airways, an incredibly innovative airline in the Mediterranean.
And all of these are digital-first airlines that have chosen to work with FLYR to address a variety of needs, from pricing optimization for fares and ancillaries to decision intelligence across all of their commercial functions.
Funding details
The company secured $150 million in Series C funding in 2021, largely due to the business growing so rapidly. And the company had a lot of new customers lined up, so they needed to quickly scale up capacity to meet the demand for their product. That round was led by WestCap and included Silver Lake, WndrCo, and JetBlue Technology Ventures, among others.
Customer feedback
Customers have highlighted FLYR’s exceptional user experience, how they are highly responsive to feature updates, and how the company delivered revenue uplift. And they also appreciate the ability to finally have one view of all their important commercial data in a usable single location.
What distinguishes FLYR Labs from its competition?
Mans cited three factors:
The first thing is the AI technology. The company uses a form of AI called deep learning that is particularly good at understanding how every piece of data – every route, every flight – correlates to one another. And airlines can use that data across their entire network to understand and predict what’s going to happen, allowing them to make more intelligent decisions that lead to better commercial outcomes more accurately.
Second is that the Commercial Operating System represents the industry’s only product that allows airlines to manage for total revenue, across flight, ancillary, and cargo.
And third is the business model. The company offers a risk-free no-cost implementation and “we do not ask to be paid until we’ve delivered measurable value or net-new, incremental revenue uplift.”
Future company goals
In the short term, FLYR wants to continue growing its core business of helping airlines manage revenue and produce better business outcomes, while also helping them improve their front-end customer experience where these decisions are evidenced.
“Beyond that, we will continue our expansion into other travel industry verticals like rental cars, railways, and cruise lines. Hotels are already in clear focus following the acquisition of Pace Revenue that I mentioned earlier. Ultimately, our goal is to build the Commercial Operating System for the transportation industry at large, one that helps travel companies unlock their full potential,” explained Mans.
