Where does your fascination for aviation come from?
When I was 17 my godfather who was a private pilot invited me on a sightseeing flight. I was instantly hooked. I then applied for FVS, the training program for military pilots at the time, and got my first hands-on flying experience. But then came the first big disappointment of my life, as I was dropped from the military pilot selection program. Then I wanted to become a civilian pilot, but the grounding of Swissair in 2001 closed this path, too. So, I decided to get a solid education before getting into aviation and studied Electrical Engineering at ETH. At the same time, I pursued my aviation interest on the ground. For example, I helped to renovate a Lockheed Super Constellation with like-minded people while still at university.

And the dream of becoming an entrepreneur?
I gathered the first experience at ETH juniors, a student consultancy. It stoked my motivation to lead a company. But after my studies, my interest in a leadership role in a large company was higher than founding my own company. Therefore, I joined Zurich Airport as a project manager. This was my career start in aviation and also where Marc, one of my co-founders, and I first worked together. Later, I joined Swiss and eventually managed the eOperations department, taking care of Flight Operations IT. That’s where I met the other two co-founders, Christoph and Alexander. Christoph programmed the first and second generation of a documentation software for Swiss. Alexander, Christoph and I specified and implemented the third generation of that software together.

Was this the moment when the idea to found a company was born?
It was actually later, at my farewell party at Swiss, when we jokingly said we should do something together in the field of electronic documentation for airlines. But it took a call from the Swiss Air Force more than a year after that for us to get serious with the incorporation of Yonder.

“Airline pilots get bombarded with information”

What is the problem that Yonder is solving?
Airline pilots get bombarded with information. With the manuals on how to operate the different aircraft and the specifications for all the airports worldwide, they have to keep track of more than 10’000 pages of text. To make it even more complicated, these manuals are updated 12 to 24 times a year. Since they are all in PDFs, the pilots don’t see what exactly has changed or if it is important for them. This is absurd. What Yonder provides is a software that makes it possible to filter this information and to create task lists that show pilots what is new and what needs to be read.

Even if pilots have information overload as you describe, somehow they do manage to fly planes even today. How are airlines dealing with this problem today?
There are several models today. Some airlines actually send out emails to pilots with the PDFs attached and the subject line “please read this”. Others work with tablets that have PDF readers installed. The pilots see which documents have changed but have no clue why the changes were made, and if they are relevant to their role. And then there are companies that sell documentation software that works with the XML data format, the same format we work with. But these companies leave the work of preparing the documents to their customers which often don’t have the time or the necessary know-how. This is why Yonder’s offering has an important service component. We do the “hands-on work” of converting PDF documents into XML modules, and we apply the relevant tags for the different roles to filter the content effectively, and for the customer to establish a lean workflow for updates and revisions.

Yonder isn’t liable for the content?
No, subject matter experts from the airlines approve all the changes. That’s why the workflow is so deeply embedded in our software solution. But the interesting part is that all the content coming from the manufacturers of airplanes is the same for every airline. What we do is updating this content once and then pass it on to all our customers.

This sounds good in theory but do you actually have clients using the software yet?
Swiss Air Force was our first customer. The go-live is after the summer holidays and Swiss military pilots will then be the first to fly with Yonder on board. Our second customer is Edelweiss with a go-live planned for early next year.

These two customers are small and based in Switzerland. Why would a big international airline talk to a small software startup like you?
First, because they are used to deal with suppliers around the globe. In fact, it’s the nature of their business. Second because we offer a service nobody else offers and our team has a strong network in the airline industry. Until today, no potential customer ever told me that what we offer isn’t useful. And as soon as we’re live, we’ll have the pilots that use Yonder showing the solution to other pilots. Pilots talk to other pilots all the time, also across airlines. And finally, we offer our customers fixed prices and they like the predictability of that model.

Speaking of Yonder’s team, it isn’t a typical “we just finished university” kind of team, right?
That’s true, I’m 37 and I’m the youngest of the co-founders. We all have solid experience both on the product side and in execution. Christoph has 15 years of experience with digital documentation software. Alex has experience in IT projects and specifically in leading development teams. Marc and I have helped scale Xovis globally, that’s where our experience in sales and service delivery comes from. And the founding team is strongly aligned on the same core values. I believe it’s as a strong plus that we aren’t that young. We can draw on so much experience and learn from past mistakes, which helps us get a few things right from the beginning.

What does your experience tell you is the most important point in building a startup?
Hiring for growth. In small organizations, you need people with the right attitude, people that want to be responsible for a significant part of your success. From my experience at Xovis, I know that there is a limit on how much you can grow and still have a coherent firm culture. In a startup, there is a thin line between how much manpower you need and how much you can actually afford. So, I think that hiring the right number of the right people is the biggest challenge.

What about fundraising, is this process a challenge as well?
The current round is the first financing round for all of us, so I talked to quite a few entrepreneurs from my network about their learnings, and one of them actually recommended that we talk to you guys from investiere. From all the talks with all those potential investors, I realized quickly that only a few of them are actually critical thinkers. But these are the people with which you want to work with because they help you to sharpen your message, rethink your approach, and bring knowledge to the table that a startup might lack in the beginning.

How far will the current fundraising bring Yonder?
We will be able to penetrate the airline industry. In the end, there are just so many companies that are potential clients. To reach out to new industries we’ll need new people with a different skill set and probably also more funds than we’re raising now. But we’re already exploring opportunities in the pharma industry which is a massive market with key players right in front of our door. Whether this will lead to another round of funding or not is an open question at this point.

Is it easier to sell to the airline industry because you can use the argument of safety?
There are many parts of the documentation that are relevant to the safety, of course, but we don’t want to sell with this argument. We want to highlight that we help the end-users to navigate large amounts of information and help to make sure that they know what they need to know. The result of this is that compliance follows automatically, therefore rendering typical compliance management systems obsolete.