Bluetail Inc., a Phoenix-based company that helps aircraft owners digitize flight records, recently raised $2.2 million in series A funding.
The investment allows Bluetail to expand its FAA-compliant, cloud-based software platform and double its staff, including new additions to its sales and marketing team, co-founder and CEO Roberto Guerrieri said.
“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.
Bluetail's software platform centralizes all the records for an aircraft — including flight hour and maintenance logs — that are typically recorded on paper. The company currently has a staff of 26, including employees and contractors.
Bluetail’s funding round was led by AZ-VC, which describes itself as Arizona’s largest venture capital firm.
The company fielded offers from other local and national investors but chose to go with AZ-VC because of its commitment to growing Arizona-based companies, Guerrieri said.
“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.”
AZ-VC was not immediately available for comment on Bluetail's funding round.
Guerrieri, along with business partner Stuart Illian, founded Bluetail in 2019. The co-founders worked together at Apple in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as at other large companies and startups. Guerrieri previously worked at Phoenix-based WebPT prior to launching Bluetail.
Bluetail sees rapid growth since its inception
The new infusion of capital follows Bluetail’s $2.1 million series A funding raise in 2021. That round was led by Scottsdale-based Brookstone Venture Capital, formerly known as Canal Partners.
Since then, Bluetail has spent the last year developing MACH Conformity, a new product module within its software portfolio that is meant to reduce the time it takes to perform FAA-required compliance inspections, Guerrieri said.
“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.”
Bluetail partnered with flight operators such as Jet It, Wheels Up and Solairus Aviation to design MACH Conformity, Guerrieri said.
The company's customers include small flight schools that use its software to track records for aircraft fleets, private jet operators and large companies that maintain their own 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.”
