Wingly, a European flight-sharing start-up has today announced a €3.5 million capital increase from its historic investors, including the Innovacom Venture Capital fund, which is particularly invested in the future of aviation, as demonstrated by its support to innovative aircraft manufacturers Elixir Aircraft and Aura Aero.
Founded in 2015, the Wingly platform is available in five countries- France (with 40% of the market share), Germany (35%), the UK (10%), Switzerland and Austria- and already offers flights about everywhere in Europe. The company recently celebrated its 100,000th passenger flight and achieved an average turnover growth of +30% per year since 2019, which includes the recent pandemic period.
With its proven business model, this new round of financing will enable the company to achieve the volumes it needs to be profitable and set a course for profitable growth while accelerating the roll-out of its electric aircraft flights, which it was the first to offer to the public from summer 2023.
Emeric de Waziers (above), co-founder of Wingly, said, “With this round of financing, we will be able to demonstrate the profitability of our model before launching our platform in other European countries. In other words, our aim is to become profitable before Wingly turns 10 in 2025.”
In addition, Wingly is opening up its capital to its community and to the public via a crowdfunding operation on the international Crowdcube platform, which has raised funds for international start-ups such as Revolut, Qonto and Vestiaire Collective. Wingly offers its members the same investment conditions as its institutional investors.
“For Wingly, it is a way of engaging and uniting its community of over 450,000 members, including 25,000 private pilots,” added Eric. “We always had requests from our members, particularly our pilot members, to invest in our start-up when announcing our past fundraisers. It is the perfect occasion! There’s nothing more beautiful and logical than sharing the success of our company with our users who bring it to life every day.”
The crowdfunding campaign was launched today (Monday, 13 May) and will be accessible via the Wingly and the Crowdcube websites until June 19th.