Skift Take
The WestCap Group has led a $150 million round in Flyr, a startup that helps travel companies boost their revenue. "Mogul management" appears to be the new "revenue management."
It's rare for young travel startups to draw luminary investors early on. Yet Flyr Labs, which has only been selling business intelligence software to airlines for about a year, revealed it had closed a $150 million equity financing round led by WestCap Group and supported by several high-profile backers. Private equity giant Silver Lake also joined as a new investor.
WestCap is a growth equity firm founded by Laurence Tosi, the former chief financial officer at Airbnb and Blackstone. Wndr, a firm founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and the co-founder of Dreamworks, also invested. Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and best-selling author of Zero to One, personally took a stake, leading the firm's Series A round and participating in the rounds since.
"Airlines have historically struggled to invest in back-end enterprise technology," said Laurence Tosi. "It's the only sector I can think of that collectively spun all their technology out because they didn't want to invest in it, creating the GDSes [global distribution systems, namely Amadeus, Sabre, and Travelport]."
"When [Flyr CEO Alex Mans] showed me he was going to the airlines and saying, 'I'll plug this in and if it works you pay me,' I thought that was bold, knowing as I do the airline customers and the suppliers and their typical models," Tosi said. "When he showed me it took less time to wire up JetBlue, which I fly all the time, than it did one of our portfolio reporting software companies to connect to enterprise risk management solutions, I was impressed, too."
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