Aerial Bits and Fortunate Atoms
Phoenix's Aviation Software gang, Bluetail Inc. Builds $2.2M in Funding
We Were Promised Jetpacks! Indie rock. What is “Indie” anyways? Well, I spent 100 seconds of my life yesterday dedicated to finding an answer to this question, and the answer is that nobody knows what indie means. “You’ll know it when you hear it”. Meaningless. Unlike the wires in the sky. Bluetail delivers structure via software to our private pilots and their mechanics. Is the future of transportation Aerial? Will anything be handwritten ever again? What is a drone?
-JJ
The Phoenix-based business Bluetail Inc., which assists owners of aircraft in digitizing flight logs, recently secured $2.2 million in series A funding.
According to co-founder and CEO Roberto Guerrieri, the investment would enable Bluetail to double its employees, add additional personnel to its sales and marketing team, and extend its cloud-based, FAA-compliant software platform.
“We grew 285% last year in a tough market, and we're seeing incredible growth as we go upstream into more operators that have larger fleets, so that requires more technology and more services,” Guerrieri said.
All of an aircraft's records, including flight hours and maintenance logs, which are traditionally kept on paper, are centralized by Bluetail's software platform. There are now 26 people working for the company, including both employees and contractors.
The largest venture capital firm in Arizona, AZ-VC, served as the round's lead investor in Bluetail.
Guerrieri added that although the company received proposals from other regional and national investors, it decided to work with AZ-VC because of its dedication to supporting the expansion of Arizona-based businesses.
“The business aviation space is getting a lot of attention from big name VCs to regional VCs,” he said. “We have been in discussions with several and chose AZ-VC for a lot of reasons. Jason Pressman, Jack Selby and Benjamin Brockwell — they have an affinity for aviation and have very good connections in the large operator space. We were looking for a true partnership, and they were by far the best.”
In 2019, Guerrieri and business partner Stuart Illian established Bluetail. In the 1980s and 1990s, the co-founders collaborated at startups as well as other established businesses, like Apple. Prior to starting Bluetail, Guerrieri worked at Phoenix-based WebPT. #patternmatch
MORE ABOUT BLUETAIL
The latest cash injection comes after Bluetail raised $2.1 million in series A fundraising in 2021. The Scottsdale-based Brookstone Venture Capital, formerly known as Canal Partners, was the lead investor in that round.
Since then, according to Guerrieri, Bluetail has spent the past year creating MACH Conformity, a new product module within its software portfolio that is intended to speed up the process of carrying out FAA-mandated compliance checks.
“Right now, it takes weeks to do that because you have to go back and research the plane back to birth,” Guerrieri said. “You can imagine the paperwork involved in when a part was replaced. It could take days or weeks to research that stuff, so this conformity module cuts that time down by 50%, so operators can earn $50,000 to $100,000 in revenue just by conforming planes faster.”
MACH Conformity was created by Bluetail in collaboration with flight companies like Jet It, Wheels Up, and Solairus Aviation, according to Guerrieri.
Customers of the business include private jet operators, huge corporations that manage their own fleets, and tiny flying schools that utilize its software to track records for aircraft fleets.
“In two and a half years, we’ve scaled from one airplane and a couple thousand records to over 600 million records in our database,” Guerrieri said. “Our search engine can find any part number, text or paint code in all those records relatively fast, so it’s a big plus for our users.”
Still curious about the FAA? For a deeper understanding of the air benders (The Rule makers of Airspace) check out this chunk. For a more “OG” article written by the wise chap, Andy Blye, peep this.
And when it comes to AZ-VC, now you know the deal.
As you enjoyed this article, be sure to subscribe so you can stay tuned on an upcoming piece of mine: A hybrid post with some opinions on Bluetail (from real pilots) and some references to Point Break 1991.