MySky was founded in 2016 in Switzerland. Today, the company is a leading AI spend management platform powering business aviation, servicing more than 1,000 private jets worldwide.
Just seven years have passed since Kiril Kim, CEO and co-founder of MySky, and his fellow co-founder and CSO Christopher Marich saw an opportunity to support aircraft owners and operators by accurately assessing and processing costs and generating accurate budgets.
Prior to MySky, Kim worked in banking while Marich held senior positions in the aviation industry. Kim’s first-hand experience in jet finances sparked the concept of MySky.
Kim says: “I was feeling frustrated by the lack of transparency within the reports I was receiving. I tried to find a solution for easier and more understandable access to financial information. That’s when the idea for MySky was born.”
After struggling to find any reports that properly analyzed the costs of running a jet, including the price of fuel, Kim and Marich set up MySky.
“In every large organization, spend management is a very important discipline that the company has to watch out for, especially in Fortune 500 companies.” says Kim. “There are thousands of airports and destinations with highly volatile costs for the vendors, which are hard to control, so it’s difficult to know how much a trip is going to cost in advance. Charter companies are spending a lot of time and resources on finding the appropriate data to even come up with a quote. We know our industry wants to be able to accurately price a trip, but until MySky, it hasn’t had the right data to do that. Business aviation wants to become more agile, but we have to solve pricing and cost problems before we can move to the next stage.”
MySky has grown significantly as clients quickly recognized the benefits the firm brings.
“Clients were recommending our services and the number of aircraft onboarded to our system was rapidly growing. Almost immediately we had around 50 planes subscribed to MySky Spend, so very quickly we could start gathering intelligence.
“Once we started processing invoices our clients were eager to understand more about their costs. So, we really started to go in depth into the cost analysis and that’s how we built our database which is becoming prominent in business aviation.”
Now, MySky’s products manage many of its customers’ back office processes as well as automating expenses, verifying invoices, and providing accurate flight budgeting. Kim says that his business helps to optimize costs but also allows owners to better comprehend running costs and formulate improved financial plans.
“So, you’re saving costs on the back office, your scalability of the business becomes much higher, and you spend less time and effort on one aircraft…It also gives you the cost analysis and it gives you an ability to optimize procurement efficiency.”
Kim adds: “In order to stay competitive in this market, you have to be accurate and in order to be accurate, you have to have data. At MySky, we truly believe that the evolution of the charter industry is held back by a lack of transparency and accurate cost analysis.”
With offices in Dubai, Lausanne in Switzerland, and New Jersey, US, MySky employs around 150 people and services more than 1,000 aircraft. The majority of MySky’s customers are business aviation aircraft operators including flight departments at Fortune 500 companies. According to Kim, “most of our business is in the US”.
The Dubai office is the newest addition to MySky’s international presence, and the company is looking to expand its customer base in the Middle East. “We are working on multiple leads to see how our solutions fit the needs of our customers in this region,” says Kim.
Looking to the future, MySky is continuously developing its proposition and will be adding new features and products throughout 2023.
