STARTUP STAGE: RubiQ manages flight disruptions to help airlines retain customers, reduce costs

What is your 30-second pitch to investors?

RubiQ helps airlines recover from flight disruptions, retain their customers and reduce costs by enabling their passengers to self-manage the entire process through an AI-based virtual assistant. 

Describe both the business and technology aspects of your startup.

Today, airlines must rely on several vendors and in-house solutions to acquire a Passenger Disruption Recovery solution. RubiQ is the only end-to-end solution that monitors flights, finds optimal alternatives even in major disruptions, communicates with disrupted passengers and enables support to follow up in real-time through a dedicated control panel. 

Aircules, the company's web-based AI assistant, guides the passengers while they choose their next flight from personalized alternatives, find hotel accommodation and transportation in overnight delays and receive food vouchers during their wait. 

Powered by proprietary optimization and machine learning algorithms, RubiQ’s platform provides personalized flight alternatives for the passenger while enforcing the airline’s rebooking rules and minimizing hidden costs. 

Give us your SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis of the company.

Strengths:
1. The only end-to-end flight disruption recovery platform in the market.
2. Competitive advantage: proprietary allocation engine, powered by game theory and machine learning algorithms, to allow for optimal and personalized rebookings.
3. Data-driven: RubiQ’s end-to-end platform continuously produces actionable insights to optimize internal procedures and uncovers hidden costs and inefficiencies.

Weaknesses:
1. Slow sale cycles.
2. Geographically fragmented market.

Opportunities:
1. Vendor lock-in. Once integrated, there are endless business opportunities.
2. Expand the end-to-end disruption support platform to help travel management companies minimize manpower costs and provide better digital customer service to their disrupted passengers.

Threats:
1. Amadeus and Sabre are potentially looking to strengthen their presence in the disruption domain.

What are the travel pain points you are trying to alleviate from both the customer and the industry perspective?

For the passenger: enable a seamless disruption recovery experience from a digital one-stop shop.

For the airline: centralize the entire recovery process under one platform, reduce manpower costs through automation, optimize rebooking fees and improve digital customer service.

So you've got the product, now how will you get lots of customers?

Targeting legacy carriers, RubiQ’s go-to-market strategy focuses on airlines that offer commercial innovation programs for startups.

Already an alumnus of Plug and Play Tech Center, Hangar 51 accelerator of the International Airlines Group and Singapore Airlines’ App Challenge, this strategy has proven useful as the company has managed to partner in less than six months with top global brands such as Iberia and Singapore Airlines.

The next step would be to penetrate the low-cost carrier market and finally expand the product to help TMCs support their travelers during flight disruptions more efficiently.

Tell us what process you've gone through to establish a genuine need for your company and the size of the addressable market.

Being avid travelers, flight disruptions were always a terrible experience for RubiQ’s founders. 

After recognizing the need from the passenger perspective, research has shown that in 2018 more than one billion passengers were disrupted on 12 million flights, costing the airline industry more than $60 billion. 

Finally, the founding team decided to partner with top aviation experts to design what they believe to be the future of flight disruption recovery.

How and when will you make money?

Already generating initial revenue from early adopters, RubiQ’s ROI first and success-based license fee model allows airlines to quickly see their return on investment and to further expand the scale of the platform.

What are the backgrounds and previous achievements of the founding team?

Experienced in management consulting, building scalable architecture from the ground up and building products that solve real problems, the founding team partnered to leverage their combined knowledge in machine learning and game theory to disrupt flight disruptions across the entire travel market.

Joining forces with a strong advisory board that consists of a world-renowned optimization professor, an NLP expert and former executives from top travel tech companies and airlines, RubiQ has built an unstoppable leadership to guide its growing startup.

What's been the most difficult part of founding the business so far?

Selling enterprise software is always challenging. Enduring long sale cycles and keeping it lean from day one was a key to survival and initial growth.

Generally, travel startups face a fairly tough time making an impact - so why are you going to be one of lucky ones?

Timing, timing and more timing.

1. Wi-Fi adoption on planes is skyrocketing. RubiQ enables airlines to offer their passengers an in-flight self-service disruption recovery. 
2. Today’s travelers want to do things fast, by themselves and from their phones. Self-service support is the next big thing.
3. In 2016, Amadeus educated the market through numerous white papers on flight disruptions, creating an urgent need and an organizational recognition for immediate change. 
4. IATA’s 830D regulation enabled airlines to fine travel agents for not including passenger contact information in the reservation. This regulation has caused a spike in the percentage of passengers with contact info, enabling airlines to significantly reach more passengers through digital channels.

A year from now, what state do you think your startup will be in?

More than $1 million in revenues, 15 employees, five paying customers and ready to penetrate the TMC market.

What is your end-game? (Going public, acquisition, growing and staying private, etc.)

Building the biggest travel tech company the world has ever seen by working with airlines, TMCs, online travel agencies and corporate travelers.