September 4, 2026

Google paid $10M for Spirit Airlines' internal data at a bankruptcy auction last month, outbidding a rival at $7.5M, for roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Teams chats alongside the finance, revenue management, and operations records of a carrier that stopped flying in May.

It caught our attention because of a conversation we keep having — a growing share of the startups we meet are building new companies to solve aviation operational problems. Nearly all of them believe AI is the technology that will finally crack the code. We have been looking at this corner of aviation for ten years, and we can tell you one thing with certainty: the binding constraint has always been access to the data. The whopping price tag of Google’s Spirit data acquisition only underscores how invaluable this type of access can be.

Tomorrow.io beat out twelve other bidders to lead NOAA's Earth Prediction Innovation Center, the program that builds and improves America's operational weather models in the open. The five-year award runs to $49M and makes the company prime contractor on a program it supported in its first phase.

Wherobots put its spatial analysis tools inside Anthropic's connector directory, so anyone can ask Claude a question about satellite imagery, property parcels, or weather data in plain English and get maps and reports back in the conversation.

GPS is free, global, and easy to knock out, which is why no incumbent technology has ever been built to replace it. Dirac Labs aims to disrupt the space with its $1.8M in pre-seed funding to develop a new kind of sensor that receives no signal at all, navigating by the Earth's magnetic field instead, making the tech impossible to jam or switch off. It's built for planes, ships, and submarines, and the company reports early interest from defense and industrial buyers.

Future Travel Experience Global | September 8-10 | Dallas-Fort Worth

Our Investment Principal, Stefan Sandoval Yepes, opens Wednesday afternoon's session on what shapes airport and airline strategy through 2040, then moderates the panel that follows, joined by American Airlines, Heathrow, Abra Group, Vantage Group, and NCTCOG.

Hybrid-electric aviation startup Ampaire secures £14m Series B (Via UKTN)

Hotel booking goes live in Google's AI Mode, flights still waiting (Via PhocusWire)

Airlines look to agentic AI for help with efficiency (Via PhocusWire)

The next robotics wave in ground operations (Via TNMT)

Joby is hiring a Head of Public Relations in Santa Cruz, California, a General Manager, Japan in Tokyo, and a Test Pilot in Marina, California.

Tomorrow.io is hiring a Senior Solutions Architect in Boston, a Radar Scientist in Golden, Colorado, and a Forward Deployed Engineer in Washington, DC.

Assaia is hiring a Project Manager in Canada and a Software Engineer, ML/Core in Spain, Serbia or Montenegro, both remote.

Gladly is hiring a Staff Software Engineer, AI & Automation, and a Strategic Account Manager, both remote.