Since its founding in 2000, JetBlue Airways has positioned itself at the forefront of change and innovation. It is this mindset that ultimately led to the creation of JetBlue Technology Ventures (JTV) five years ago.
As a corporate venture capital firm, one of our top priorities is making a return to contribute to JetBlue’s bottom line. Yet perhaps just as importantly, we also aim to help our parent company navigate the future of travel by fostering innovation from within.
So what does this goal look like in practice? At JTV, we commonly leverage proof-of-concepts (POCs) as a method of trialing promising startups with JetBlue. This allows us to test, improve, and ultimately implement new ideas to enhance our customer experience and advance enterprise technology.
To date, we’ve completed over 25 POCs with startups that specialize across all stages of the travel ribbon. A recent success story is our work with Tomorrow.io, a weather technology company that generates minute-by-minute weather predictions at near pinpoint accuracy.
Micro weather, global coverage
We invested in Tomorrow.io three years ago when it was valued at $65M — now, with more than $100M raised in venture funding and a plan to launch proprietary weather radar satellites into space, it has delivered on its promise to completely disrupt the weather industry by changing how enterprise businesses leverage weather to improve efficiency and operations.
Every day, companies make critical business decisions based on the weather — but these decisions are only as good as a forecast itself. Tomorrow.io aims to help its customers by accurately predicting the weather using historical, real-time, and forecasted weather data.
Aviation is an industry heavily impacted by weather on a day-to-day basis, which made Tomorrow.io a natural fit for a POC at JetBlue. After our initial investment, JTV assisted JetBlue in launching a trial at five focus cities. This allowed JetBlue to “stress-test” Tomorrow.io’s system and ensure it met operational needs. Over the next year, we partnered closely with these trial groups to monitor adverse weather events and make certain Tomorrow.io not only delivered on its promise to predict the weather, but would also help our ground crew’s ability to make weather-related decisions.
During this period there were numerous times that Tomorrow.io delivered valuable returns to JetBlue by minimizing operational disruptions. For instance, in April 2019 Boston experienced an overnight snowstorm that would affect flights the following morning. Most weather forecasts predicted that the snow would continue until 11:00 a.m. the next day. Contrastingly, Tomorrow.io reported that the snow would tail off by 8:00 a.m. As anticipated, the snow tapered off at 8:00 a.m. That day alone delivered an estimated savings of $100K in cancellation-related costs of eight flights. In this business, every minute matters!
The POC concluded in 2019 and proved a resounding success. JetBlue rolled out Tomorrow.io network-wide in 2020 and continues to partner closely with the team today.
Where we’re headed
We firmly believe that the best path to innovation is through experimentation and an endless appetite for learning and growth. With the successful implementation of Tomorrow.io behind us, we are excited for all that is to come in 2021. JetBlue has been (and always will be!) at the forefront of innovation — it’s simply in our DNA.
