An Annapolis luxury flight company has received $100 million in new financing and is now looking to nearly double its fleet of private aircraft in the next six months.
AeroVanti Air Club is hoping to add 12 to 15 planes to its existing 16-plane fleet within the next six months. The rapidly growing company is coming off of a series A funding round that raised $9.75 million in July.
Lafayette Aircraft Leasing, a group of private investors, is leading the new round of financing. AeroVanti founder and CEO Patrick Britton-Harr said he previously worked with Lafayette to acquire several of the company’s planes, and those connections led to the successful financing opportunity.
The investment, announced on Wednesday, is akin to a fund that AeroVanti can access to purchase planes with a maximum dollar amount of $100 million. It is not an equity raise.
AeroVanti is planning to seek new opportunities within the charter flight market, expanding from helping small groups and individuals with business or vacation trips to flying large organizations, such as entire NFL teams, on Boeing 767’s and other large aircraft. Britton-Harr views the NFL as an opportunity to compete with commercial airlines that are more focused on regular trips. Instead, AeroVanti can offer boutique services, such as players' names etched into the seats of a plane.
Britton-Harr launched the company in 2021 with a focus on creating a more affordable alternative to the private plane industry, since he believed there was too big of a gap between commercial airlines and private costs.
The company is adding two new hangers in Sarasota to accompany its current hangers in Easton, Sarasota, Florida, and Austin, Texas. The company is dual headquartered in Annapolis, where the accounting and administrative team is operated, and Sarasota, where flight dispatching and scheduling are located.
“We're just filling the gaps. Our company is really vertically integrated, and a lot of these opportunities and developments come from our members,” Britton-Harr said.
The company said 90% of their flights originate in the North East megapolis, an urban region stretching from Washington D.C. to Boston. Britton-Harr said despite the massive amount of funding the company has received over the past year, it is still pursuing a measured growth strategy. Instead of having 100 flight club members per plane like competitors in the market, Britton-Harr said, the company has scaled back, having around 50 members per plane in the fleet. That allows the company to better listen to customer demand.
Along with an expansion of the company's flight of planes, AeroVanti is also growing into the boating industry. The company has already purchased four different vessels for AeroVanti Yacht club based in Annapolis, and Tampa Bay and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The recent initiative will allow club members to charter yachts and luxury fishing boats similar to how planes are chartered through AeroVanti.
“Yachts are similar to aircrafts and people like to utilize them for certain needs, but managing and owning them isn't really palatable,” Britton Harr said.
Britton-Harr hopes the AeroVanti can eventually evolve into providing full-service travel from the air, sea and land.
AeroVanti also has big plans for the future. The company told the Tampa Bay Business Journal that it plans to go public within the next six months. The company is considering going public through a SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, a way for a firm to go public without a traditional IPO. However, SPAC companies have performed poorly as of late after an explosion of deals in 2021. A recent report from Renaissance Capital found that, of the 199 companies that went public through a SPAC merger in 2021, "only 11% trade above the offer price, and the group averages a -43% return."
In Baltimore, two companies that went public through SPAC deals are now facing financial challenges, ZeroFox and BigBear.ai.
