San Francisco based Uber is a venture-funded startup that was founded by Travis Kalanick, Oscar Salazar and Garrett Camp in 2009. The company gained popularity when they successfully launched their first mobile app, which allows users can get in touch with high end cars and SUVs that are available for hire. After that initial service took off, Uber never looked back as this company started various successful projects such car washes, home improvement, taxi services and more.
Now co-founder Camp and his team are all set to launch another venture which is similar in spirit to Uber for private jets. This latest addition in company’s profile is named BlackJet. Through this project, Uber will look to facilitate charter and private jet services to bridge the gap between demand and supply so that they can fill in the vacant seats on the flights. In this way charter and private jet services will be able to access a level of demand that was not there before while also profiting from the added reach.
Initially, BlackJet will make two routes available; from New York to South Florida and New York to Los Angeles and later they will be catering flights from New York to Las Vegas and San Francisco to Los Angeles. Other routes will catered to on special demand, says Camp.
Camp, who is also the founder and CEO of StumbleUpon is supporting this project along with the star studded line-up of investors that includes, Ashton Kutcher, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Guy Oseary, First Round Capital, Michael Birch, Naval Ravikant, Rick Marini, Shervin Pishevar, SV Angel, Noah Goodhart, Jay Levy, Thomas Ryan, Josh Spear, Science Inc.’s Peter Pham, Stephen Russell, Mike Jones, Dan Rosensweig, Tim Ferriss, Steve Jang, Shakil Khan, David Ulevitch, Matt Mullenweg and Ryan Sarver. Aside from aforementioned list of BlackJet investors, recent parties to provide investment funds to the cause are Overbrook Entertainment, Roc Nation and Precedent Investments.
Camp seems quite thrilled about this new venture as it presents a lot of opportunities for his company. According to him there are nearly 4,000 charter and private jets that mostly remain grounded or fly with partially filled seats. On top of that, these charter and private planes fly for only one hour on average in comparison to commercial flights that fly for 11 hours on average during a day. As a result of that charter and private jet services are losing a lot in terms of potential revenue.
For these troubled charter and private jet services, BlackJet will design a more effective travel process that will cater to their first-class and business class travelers. Thanks to the service, patrons of private jet will have to spend less than usual, whereas business travelers can get rid of all the fuss of getting through security and boarding by spending a little more than a first class ticket for a commercial flight.
BlackJet will also be able to reduce the required travel time of travelers. For instance, the journey between San Francisco and Los Angeles will take a mere 2 hours rather than the commercial standard of 4. On top of it, BlackJet has already pre-launched these services by allocating 3,000 seats in over 800 flights. This means that charter and private jet travelers will not need to wait long for such attractive services.
In order to even further simplify the travel process, BlackJet is installing a digital component so that travelers can not only book their seats online, but also do so through a mobile application.
Source: Tech Crunch
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