August 7, 2026

Latam Airlines Group is building the first airline venture arm in Latin America. The Chilean carrier registered Latam Ventures SpA (article is in Spanish only) in Santiago in May with $18M in capital, chartered to take stakes in startups and technology projects. 

Other carriers are moving the same way. Turkish Airlines launched a venture fund in May and put its first check into an AI procurement startup, and All Nippon Airways and IndiGo have both raised funds of their own in the past two years. 

These airlines are all stepping into a well-funded category: aviation startups took nearly half of all venture dollars across travel and mobility tech last year, more than any other segment.

The last aviation startup boom sent the majority of capital to eVTOL and hypersonic concepts. In our conversations with airlines, the interest has moved to the software layer underneath the aircraft, closer to whether a departure actually leaves on time. Latam's charter corroborates that, naming software, big data, payments, and marketing.

ThreatLocker raised $190M in Series F funding led by Elephant, well above the $1.6B valuation from its last round, and is opening a UK office. Its software blocks unapproved applications and AI tools by default across more than 70,000 organizations.

Volantio was featured in Bloomberg this week for its new platform, Vector, which uses agentic AI to match airline capacity with demand after a flight is booked.

Joby formed a partnership with Atoms to acquire and build vertiport sites in Florida, New York, Texas, and California, where Joby is preparing early commercial service.

ThreatLocker is hiring an Account Executive in London and an Account Manager in Dubai.

Assaia is hiring a Data Scientist in Spain and a Software Engineer in Spain, Serbia, or Montenegro. 

Wherobots is hiring engineers, designers, and go-to-market roles, all remote.

Tomorrow.io is hiring across sales, engineering, and people operations in Boston and Tel Aviv.

The operational data inside an airline is proprietary and takes real industry context to interpret, which general-purpose AI models can't do on their own. That's the opening behind our vertical AI thesis: software built around the workflows of a specific industry rather than sold as a general tool. Arrakis is going after that opening in aerospace, energy, and logistics, embedding a dedicated team in each sector so its agents are tuned to that industry's operations, watching for supplier failures, flagging overspending, and tracking shipments. Seven months after launching, it came out of stealth with a $30M Series A led by Blossom Capital at a $140M valuation, with NYSE-listed customers already using it.

Could the most radical plane design since the Concorde take on Boeing? (Via The Wall Street Journal) *paywall

Higher airfares loom on busy routes as AI squeezes out bargains (Via Bloomberg) *paywall

Global air travel had busiest day on record despite recent headwinds (Via Newsweek)

A record 14 billion-dollar rounds in July pushed venture's historic run higher (Via Crunchbase News)

Expedia calls on Layla to speed up its AI strategy (Via PhocusWire)

Booking Holdings: AI visibility is up, but referrals stay under 1% of room nights (Via PhocusWire)