News
We've raised $1.5m to tackle flight disruptions
May 20, 2026
We've raised $1.5m to tackle flight disruptions
Today, we're announcing our $1.5m pre-seed round to keep building and evolving Wingman, our AI decision-support platform for airline operations.
The round included Baobab Ventures and United Airlines Ventures, as well as Pegasus Airlines Innovation Lab and Masia, and industry and tech angel investors.
Why we built Wingman
Leo spent close to a decade flying commercial aircraft before starting Overwatch AI with Nikita. He felt firsthand what daily life in airline operations looks like: you sit down with twenty minutes to your flight, and you start trawling. Weather, NOTAMs, fuel, runway state, MEL, FTL, company ops manuals, flight plans. Different apps, different data formats, different login screens.
You spend more time piecing together the picture than flying the plane.
Operations control teams have it worse. They are doing the same trawling, for hundreds of flights, against rules from union agreements, maintenance schedules, airport curfews, and a stack of regulations that nobody reads cover to cover. When something slips through the cracks, the cost shows up as a delay, a diversion, or a violation.
We built Wingman to close that gap. Pilots, dispatchers, OCC, cabin crew, and ground staff can ask questions in plain language and get sourced answers in seconds, pulled from the actual documents and live operational data they would otherwise be searching by hand.
What live deployments have taught us
Wingman is already running in live operations across multiple airlines, which collectively support more than 30,000 flights a month. The numbers from real usage:
150 hours saved per team member per year
Up to $4m saved annually per airline, on average
4.6x increase in compliant decision making
6.6% increase in overall crew productivity
The system was purpose-built for the requirements of airline operations, which is why every answer Wingman returns is grounded in official documentation or operational data, and verifiable at a glance. In a safety-critical industry like aviation, this is crucial to ensure crews and operators can trust the output enough to act on it under time pressure.
A word on our partners
Pegasus Airlines were one of the first to deploy Wingman in real airline operations. Their team gave us operational context, documentation, and feedback that you cannot get from a whiteboard. Having them now join as customer, design partner and investor tells us we are building the right thing, in the right way.
Carles Reina at Baobab Ventures brings a deep understanding of driving growth in enterprise environments. United Airlines Ventures brings further industry validation and their perspective from inside one of the largest carriers in the world, raising the bar on what Wingman has to do next. Masia is our key anchor to the Barcelona startup ecosystem and beyond. Our angel investors have extensive backgrounds in both AI infrastructure and aviation, and their judgment on AI deployments in regulated industries is something we are going to lean on heavily. All in all, we couldn't have come up with a better team of supporters on our side along this journey.
What we are doing with the funding
Three things:
Growing the team. Engineering, product, and aviation domain experts. If you have built for high-stakes environments, especially in aviation, talk to us.
Expanding what Wingman can do. More integrations, deeper coverage across the operational use cases we focus on and expanding to more user groups.
Scaling delivery. Rolling out to more airlines over the coming months without compromising on the service quality that makes the product actually useful in a cockpit, the OCC and the airport.
What’s next
We are on track to deploy Wingman with more airlines in the coming months. Each one has its own unique operational environment, but they all work with similar underlying data and share the same fundamental problems Wingman is built to solve.
Alongside that, we are working on other key partnerships to help propagate our AI capabilities further across the industry.
If you operate an airline and you want your help your frontline teams spend less time hunting for information and more time ensuring operations run smoothly, get in touch.
Thanks to everyone who has supported and trusted us so far. We're excited to start this next chapter together.
Leo & Nikita
Co-founders
Overwatch AI