Odysee CEO Steve Casley believes there are dollar signs in the data. More specifically, it is AI-powered software that can analyze large amounts of data to help commercial airlines make the most of complex flight schedules.
Odysee, the first startup to emerge from an aviation-focused venture lab founded by Alaska Airlines and UP.Labs, is doing just that. The two companies founded Venture Lab last year to create a startup company aimed at addressing specific issues in air travel, including guest experience, operational efficiency, aircraft maintenance, routes and revenue management. Odysee announced it has raised $5 million in a pre-seed round led by UP.Partners, a Los Angeles-based VC firm with ties to UP.Labs. Alaska Star Ventures, founded in October 2021, invested $15 million in UP.Partners' first early-stage fund.
Kathley said Alaska Airlines CEO Ben Minicucci warned him early on that there would be problems with the schedule. No wonder. While there are software that provides flight data analysis and scheduling, Casley argues that they all lack the real-time and, importantly, revenue forecasting that Odysee is building on.
“You need some tools to make better decisions, because schedule changes on any airline are typically made intuitively by experienced planners,” Casely said in a recent interview. spoke. “I'm not going to say by the seat of their pants, because they've experienced bad change and good change, so a good deal of it is right. But they actually have the data to back up those decisions. I didn’t have it.”
The company says the software is equipped with data and can run hundreds of simulations within seconds to quickly quantify how schedule changes will impact revenue, profits and reliability. That's what it means.
“There are other optimizers out there, but to my knowledge, none of the companies that provide these models or optimizations provide revenue forecasting,” Casley said.
The machine learning model built by Odysee includes approximately 42 attributes that cover everything from departure times and dates to traffic conditions on a particular route and competitors' schedules. The startup found in early simulations that just one schedule change could save the state of Alaska hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Odysee is currently conducting user acceptance testing with Alaska. Once that's complete, Alaska will begin trials of the software, which Casely expects to begin by the end of October.
That's a simple timeline considering UP.LABs and Alaska Airlines just founded the Aviation Venture Lab a year ago. Rapid transition to commercial products is one of UP.Labs' main selling points. First established in 2022, UP.Labs is structured as a venture lab with a new type of financial investment vehicle. The company is partnering with major companies such as Porsche, Alaska Airlines, and most recently J.B. Hunt to create startups with new business models that aim to solve the industry's biggest problems. Under each partnership, six startups will be created over a three-year period.
The way UP.Labs is structured, these startups aren't just created to serve a corporate partner, in this case Alaska Airlines. Rather, they operate as independent, commercial enterprises from the beginning, ultimately generating revenue by selling products and services throughout the industry.