Looking back on our 2019
By: Bonny Simi
Tags: Venture Capital, Travel, Aviation, Silicon Valley, Innovation

New Faces

We welcomed five new team members in 2019, growing our investment and operations efforts in New York and Silicon Valley:

We also hosted two Summer Associates to introduce more young professionals to corporate venture capital. Each shared thoughts on our blog about their experience — Adrianna Samangiego, from Columbia Business School, and Sloan Rudberg, from London Business School.

New Investments

We reviewed almost 2,000 new startups in 2019, met in person with 300+ new entrepreneurs, and grew our portfolio with the exciting additions of:

A snapshot of the growing JTV portfolio.

We also made seven follow-on investments with existing portfolio companies — Lumo, Skyhour, FLYR, Unicoaero, Redeam, Shape Security and Joby Aviation. This brings JTV to a total of 25 initial investments and 18 follow-on investments to date in our almost four years.

Ecosystem Partnerships

In April, we announced a second partner in our international innovation program — Vantage Airport Group — to collaborate on deal flow and initiatives to improve the airport experience. Vantage joined Air New Zealand, our program launch partner from 2018, and a soon-to-be-announced third partner.

We helped facilitate six proof-of-concepts for Vantage and Air New Zealand last year, including with ClimaCell and Assaia. That’s in addition to the six new proof-of-concepts launched in 2019 with JetBlue Airways and JetBlue Travel Products, including with our portfolio companies Lumo and Unicoaero.

Innovation Programming

We were grateful to speak at 35+ travel and technology conferences last year as well as host a series of our own startup pitch events in Boston, London, New York, and Miami in partnership with Voyager HQ. We also organized an inaugural Blockchain Travel Summit in March in New York City with 30+ speakers and almost 200 attendees to deep dive into blockchain technology applications for travel and hospitality. Check out the highlight reel of the day and a three-part blog series detailing our learnings from the event.

Amy Burr welcoming attendees at our Blockchain Travel Summit.

In October, Vantage and JTV hosted a workshop with industry stakeholders to debate what’s in store for the next generation of airports. We explored how to integrate more comfort, charm, process, and cutting-edge technology into airports to improve the customer experience.

We also helped three JetBlue Airways teams — Tech Ops, Legal and Sustainability, and System Ops Control — understand and envision the next generation of their respective business units through our signature Innovation Sprints. These are 12-week collaborative programs to help the teams maintain a fresh outlook and understand what the future of their sector looks like by getting to know a select group of startups.

And for some weekend reading, if you missed it last fall, JTV Managing Director of Investments Raj Singh shared insights and tips for founders seeking funding from travel and hospitality investors and Amy Burr shared perspective on how startups can best build out and manage proof-of-concepts.

Portfolio Milestones

Lastly, here are some notable 2019 highlights and achievements from across our portfolio: