Stellar Labs

About Stellar Labs

Stellar Labs, Inc. was established in 2014 by co-founders Paul Touw and David Fox, aiming to modernize the business aviation sector. Touw's background includes co-founding the business-to-business marketplace Ariba and founding the private jet company XOJET, experiences that provided deep insights into the operational and technological needs of the aviation industry. Fox, serving as CEO, brought entrepreneurial experience from co-founding a tech distributor in Australia and later launching a web-based digital commerce venture in San Francisco.

The company operates in the business aviation market, providing a suite of digital tools for charter operators, corporate flight departments, brokers, and their customers. Stellar's core offering is a cloud-based operations management platform that integrates scheduling, predictive pricing, route optimization, and a digital marketplace. This technology is designed to enhance efficiency and profitability for operators by automating complex processes and providing data-driven insights. For clients booking flights, the platform acts as a digital marketplace to search, book, and pay for private jet charters.

A significant milestone for the company was a strategic partnership with Rockwell Collins announced in 2016 to co-develop a next-generation flight operations management platform based on Rockwell Collins' ARINCDirect® Flight Operations System (FOS). This collaboration was designed to merge Stellar's commercial solutions with the established FOS, which was already used by hundreds of operators. The joint effort led to the launch of Stellar Cloud, a software delivery infrastructure for business aviation. In October 2016, Stellar Labs acquired FlightApps, a firm specializing in aviation technology and a major service provider for FOS, to accelerate the delivery of its platform.

Stellar Labs secured $26.3 million in a Series A funding round in October 2017, with investors including Global Jet Capital, Columbia Equity Partners, and Expa, a venture fund from Uber co-founder Garrett Camp. This funding, combined with previous rounds and support from Rockwell Collins, brought the total investment in its platform to over $50 million. In a strategic move in October 2023, Magellan Jets acquired Stellar Labs' AI-powered software platform to streamline its jet card and charter quoting process. Magellan planned to operate Stellar as an independent service provider to its network of aviation partners while using the technology to power its own mobile app and website.