It’s rare for young travel startups to draw luminary investors early on. Yet Flyr Labs, which has only been selling business intelligence software to airlines for about a year, revealed it had closed a $150 million equity financing round led by WestCap Group and supported by several high-profile backers. Private equity giant Silver Lake also joined as a new investor.
WestCap is a growth equity firm founded by Laurence Tosi, the former chief financial officer at Airbnb and Blackstone. Wndr, a firm founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and the co-founder of Dreamworks, also invested. Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and best-selling author of Zero to One, personally took a stake, leading the firm’s Series A round and participating in the rounds since.
“Airlines have historically struggled to invest in back-end enterprise technology,” said Laurence Tosi. “It’s the only sector I can think of that collectively spun all their technology out…