Wingly raises €3 million to launch Wingly Pro ! 🚀

Having established ourselves as the leading flight sharing platform in Europe over the past 5 years, we have now raised an additional €3 million from the Innovacom Fund in Paris. This fundraise supports two key objectives: our venture into the commercial aviation market in Europe, with the launch of Wingly Pro flights, and further accelerating growth of cost-shared flights in their largest markets of the UK, France and Germany.

Funds to launch commercial operations and to take cost-sharing flights to new heights:

 
With the launch of Wingly Pro this summer, we will extend our vision and make Wingly the largest collaborative community for Private aviation. This foray into commercial aviation will help us respond to the transport oriented demand from our community, complementing the leisure-oriented cost-shared flights currently being offered on our platform by our 20,000 strong private pilots. By addressing both demands, we are making flying more accessible than ever before. This furthers our objective to connect the 500+ airfields in the country and also expands our inventory to add many more helicopter flights. Furthermore, with illegal charter operations plaguing the private aviation sector, our platform will be able to provide clarity and transparency to the public. This will enable them to select trusted operators and pilots, whose documents have been thoroughly checked and verified by Wingly and who are operating within the rules.

As part of the expansion of Wingly Pro, we are working on establishing partnerships with SMEs in the private aviation sector, who possess valid certifications from the civil aviation authority for commercial air transport across Europe. There are hundreds of small private aviation companies across the continent which might not have the expansive presence that we are fortunate enough to boast. With our digital expertise, we aim to become the first online platform that allows operators to advertise their flights and connect directly with potential passengers. Additionally, we will allow operators to post any flights with spare seats, including empty legs and repositioning flights, on the platform. In order to aid this, we have also recently obtained a European wide travel agency licence. Moreover, we are developing a large variety of new features on the platform to facilitate the launch of this new venture. The first feature launched in June is flight request, which allows users to directly post the type of flights they are looking for on the website, and based on the criteria can be fulfilled by either commercial operators or by a cost-shared flight with private pilots.

The President of the Innovacom fund, Jerome Paul, recently said: “With the way the current global pandemic has affected the mobility and travel sector, aviation will require a fundamental change in approach as well as suitable digital tools”

It is essential for Wingly to be able to contribute to the development of sustainable aviation. Lots of operated charter flights are carried out with less than 40% occupancy. Our interest here is to fill empty seats, improve the aircraft occupancy rate, thus reducing the carbon footprint per passenger as well as the cost for all parties.

These features and new ideas a whole new set of doors for Wingly. We are the benchmark collaborative platform for private aviation and, today more than ever, we continue to democratise this industry, this exceptional means of transport and leisure. We meet very quickly for the announcement of many new features.

Fasten your belts, Wingly is taking to new heights! 🚀