1.5 million US dollars flutter in for Overwatch AI

Aviation tech startup Overwatch AI has closed a pre-seed financing round of 1.5 million US dollars. The company intends to use the capital to further develop its AI-supported decision-making platform "Wingman", which supports airlines in their operational processes.

Participants in the round include Baobab Ventures, United Airlines Ventures, Pegasus Airlines Innovation Lab and Masia. We don't actually publish any non-European rounds, but one of the founders is the former Austrian airline pilot Leo Kotil.

AI support for cockpit and Operations Control Center

The founders behind Overwatch AI are Leo and Nikita. The idea for Wingman came from the founding team's experience in airline operations. Pilots and operations teams have to collate large amounts of information from different systems every day. This includes weather data, flight plans, maintenance information, regulations, manuals and regulatory requirements.

Wingman is designed to simplify these processes by allowing users to ask questions in natural language and receive verified answers from official documents and live data within seconds.

Already in live operation with several airlines

According to the startup, Wingman is already being used productively by several airlines. The platform currently supports airline operations with a total of more than 30,000 flights per month.

According to Overwatch AI, this results in measurable efficiency gains:

• Up to 150 man-hours saved per team member per year,
• average savings of up to 4 million US dollars per airline,
• a 4.6-fold increase in rule-compliant decisions,
• and a 6.6 percent increase in crew productivity.

Traceable AI in safety-critical areas

As the aviation industry is highly regulated and safety-critical, Wingman relies on traceable and verifiable AI responses.

According to the company, every response from the platform is based on official documents or live operational data and should be immediately verifiable. In this way, Overwatch AI wants to ensure that crews and operations teams can trust the AI results even under time pressure.

One of the early adopters is Pegasus Airlines, whose teams have already used Wingman in real airline operations. The company is now not only a customer, but also a strategic partner and investor. According to Overwatch AI, United Airlines Ventures also contributes valuable perspectives from the operations of one of the world's largest airlines.

Capital flows into team building and expansion

Overwatch AI plans to use the fresh capital to expand its engineering, product development and aviation expertise in particular. Wingman will also receive additional integrations and cover further operational use cases within airlines.

At the same time, the startup is working on scaling its platform to support more airlines in the future.