Scoop: Luxury jet club Bond adds $44 million
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Illustration: Maura Kearns/Axios
Bond, a luxury jet club that recently stunned the aviation market with a $1.7 billion Bombardier order, has quietly raised $44 million from a group of ultra-wealthy individuals.
Why it matters: This is the rare startup that views scale as an impediment.
How it works: Bond is a fractional ownership platform, promising newer and heavier planes than market leaders NetJets and Flexjet. Plus higher-end service, including guaranteed cabin crews and Starlink connections.
- Founding investors are mostly billionaires, including private equity and hedge fund managers — some of whom own planes that will join the Bond fleet (so long as the planes are less than 10 years old).
- Bond's curated membership. — mostly coming via referrals — is designed to make it something akin to a social club, or even a Davos in the sky.
- Too many members means it risks losing its ultra-luxe service. No jet cards, no charters.
Follow the money: The new funding is Bond's second "founding partners" round, the first of which raised $30 million earlier this year.
- I'm restricted from sharing the identities, but suffice to say most of them are household names to the business community. Minimum investment was $500,000, plus flying hours commitments. To buy in at $1 million, investors needed to commit to at least 100 annual hours.
- Bond's top institutional investor is KKR, which led a $320 million preferred equity and debt financing round in the fall.
- KKR also backed the prior company of Bond CEO Bill Papariella, which was sold for a 5.5x equity return.
Look ahead: First flights are scheduled for 2027, as new plane orders take years to fulfill (and used planes have become hard to come by post-COVID).
- Bond also has an option to purchase more jets from Bombardier, which could bring its total order up to $4 billion.
The bottom line: Papariella and his investors plan to create a company worth billions of dollars, but the sky isn't necessarily the limit.
