One of the most popular hobbies that you may or may not have heard of is flight tracking.
For example, in September 2022, the Royal Air Force Boeing C-17A Globemaster III carrying Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin from Edinburgh to an RAF base outside London was followed by nearly 5 million people.
It’s also a goldmine of data. The most popular flight-tracking websites display the trajectories of tens of thousands of flights per day on their digital maps.
But what you may not know is that this is only possible thanks to a network of dedicated volunteers who collect and transmit data from the planes to tracking sites.
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A new startup, Wingbits, now wants to compensate the network of enthusiasts for their services by sharing its revenue through blockchain technology. The idea is to promote rapid growth in coverage and improve data reliability.
Rewards are based on performance, coverage and availability. There are also rankings that compare the best performing antennas in the world.
“Based on your performance as a data provider, you are rewarded proportionally,” co-founder Robin Wingårdh told TNW from the company’s offices in Stockholm.
Incentivize flight trackers by rewarding high-quality data
Flight tracking is accomplished through Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B), a new satellite tracking method that requires both an airborne component and ground infrastructure.
Nearly 70% of commercial aircraft worldwide are now equipped with an ADS-B transponder. The ground component consists of volunteers who agree to host receivers in the form of antennas. The Wingbits network ensures data authenticity through cryptographically signed transmissions and proof of location,
The business idea behind Wingbits is to incentivize these volunteers to increase their engagement and data quality with more and better equipment, etc. by paying them for their data and then selling it to the startup’s own B2B customers in the aviation industry.
“(The performance-based model) allows us to do a lot of things,” Wingårdh said. “Our uptime is really high and we can offer incentives by area. If we need to grow in a specific area, we can offer higher incentives in that area.”
But hardcore aviation fans may now face competition from the Web3 community. “We’re trying to balance the two communities, which is a little harder than it sounds because you have to sell the benefits of two worlds that are a little different,” said co-founder Alex Lungu.
So far, it’s worked well. By the end of 2023, the Wingbits platform had 40 antennas. Today, there are 1,600, simply through word of mouth and community support.
“The community now has a clear interest in keeping their antennas online and making them as good as possible,” Lungu said, adding that the startup is getting very technical on its Discord server (which has two community managers) to help people get the most out of their antenna coverage.
As a result, Wingbits’ platform, while still in beta, has very low latency. “It’s less than two seconds for 95 percent of all data,” Wingårdh said.
Seed financing round oversubscribed
Lungu and Wingårdh, who both held senior positions at Klarna, bonded over the idea during an Antler residency in Stockholm last year. Antler is also one of the investors backing the startup in its $3.5 million funding round, announced today.
“Robin and Alex are a world-class founding team that has identified a truly unique application for blockchain technology,” said Oscar Westergard, Partner at Antler. “They are empowering an overlooked, but deeply engaged, community to create the world’s best flight tracking network.”
Two US venture capital firms, Web3 asset manager Borderless Capital and early-stage tech specialist Tribe Capital, led the oversubscribed seed funding round. The money will be used to expand the technology side (which means hiring more data scientists and developers, allowing Lungu to take a break from coding) and focus more on sales and marketing.
Wingbits also markets custom hardware for its growing flight tracker community, to ensure it won’t fall prey to spoofing or fake data.
“While it’s not a major problem yet, it’s growing,” Wingårdh says. “We secure all this hardware with a cryptographic chip and a GPS module so we know exactly where the device is and can validate that the data is coming from that specific device.”
