flyiin: The (Short) Story

More context.

Founded in the second half of 2015, flyiin was the result of a grand vision for airline distribution that dated back to 2005. The technology that powers online travel agencies and flight search engines had remained largely unchanged for many years, leading to a digital experience that felt (and still feels) similar, boring, and frustrating.

Our Grand Vision

Our idea was to build a new consumer-facing product called Air Travel Marketplace that would combine the benefits of shopping across a wide range of airline companies (like online travel agencies and flight search engines) with the benefit of purchasing flight tickets directly with the chosen airline (like with the websites and apps of the airlines).

It took two years to garner interest from a lead investor for this contrarian product concept. In the summer of 2017, we signed a term sheet with a US-based hedge fund for a $2M+ seed round, which also involved a family office and our close advisor and first investor who had been with us from the beginning. However, because we were incorporated in Germany and unable to flip the company into a Delaware company, the term sheet did not translate into fresh cash. Talk about bad luck (and poor homework).

Rebirth

The following 18 months were marked by near collapse. Given the complexity of securing local investors for a consumer-facing travel venture, we chose to focus on the tech aspect of our venture and pivoted the company to a business-to-business model. Despite this setback, my remarkable tech co-founder managed to build - literally on his own - a first iteration of our flight ticket sales platform (known as Airline DirectConnect Platform) while signing our first airline partners and a first customer for the platform.

This helped us bring together a new pool of angel investors, all of whom were closely working with the airline industry. We signed a new term sheet, which was successfully executed early in 2019. From that point, flyiin became a company, with the means to start building up a team, a reliable product, and a large portfolio of airline partners, as well as an even larger group of pilot customers.

Our Way Out

Then Covid hit. Our second grand vision, which was to allow any online player beyond online travel agencies (such as hotel chains, e-commerce players, banks, mobility startups, etc.) to sell flight products to their customers, became obsolete overnight. Not only did our proposition become obsolete to our target markets, but the company became a burden to the majority of our angel investors.

We were asked to look for potential buyers. Thanks to the quality of the engineering team and the superiority of the platform they had built, we luckily drew the attention of a top US-based online travel agency (Priceline), which we integrated in May 2021.