When a warning light blinks on at cruising altitude, pilots don't have time to flip through three-ring binders. But they also can't always count on a stable internet connection to search digital manuals. That's the peculiar constraint behind Overwatch AI, a Barcelona startup that secured $1.5 million in May 2026 to bring offline artificial intelligence into the cockpit.
The company closed its pre-seed round in late May with backing from United Airlines Ventures and a clutch of investors betting on regulated-industry tech. At the center of the pitch: an edge AI platform called Wingman that answers natural-language queries about flight operations, maintenance logs, and weather alerts—all without needing to phone home to the cloud.
It's a niche problem. Perhaps more niche than most AI startups would tolerate. But for airlines, where connectivity above 35,000 feet remains unreliable and regulatory compliance isn't optional, it's the kind of problem worth solving.
When PDF Viewers Aren't Enough
Overwatch AI's founders—CEO Leo Kotil, a former airline pilot, and CPTO Nikita Kaeshko, who previously worked on autonomous vehicle systems—started the company in July 2025. Their argument is straightforward: most electronic flight bag systems are glorified PDF readers with keyword search. Pilots still hunt through documents the old-fashioned way, scrolling and scanning for the right paragraph while managing a cockpit full of other demands.
Wingman, by contrast, pulls together flight manuals, maintenance records, NOTAMs (notices to airmen), and weather data into a single interface. Ask it a question in plain language, and it surfaces an answer sourced directly from official documentation. The company is emphatic about that last point—answers are "fully sourced," a detail that matters in an industry where citing the wrong reference can trigger audits or worse.
According to Overwatch AI, the platform is already handling north of 30,000 flights per month across multiple airlines. The company hasn't named those customers publicly, though the presence of United Airlines Ventures and Pegasus Innovation Lab—the venture arm of Turkey's Pegasus Airlines—in the cap table offers some hints about where traction might be building.
Strategic Money, Industry Skeptics
United Airlines Ventures, launched in 2021, has carved out a lane investing in aviation infrastructure and sustainability tech. Pegasus Innovation Lab brings a European operator's perspective. Rounding out the round: Baobab Ventures, a European fund focused on AI, robotics, and defense that launched late last year under operator Carles Reina; Barcelona angel collective Masia; and Dooks Capital, a seed fund specialized in aviation intelligence.
Individual backers include David Bennett, formerly chief customer and commercial officer at AI chip maker Tenstorrent and founder of consultancy ai&, and Alex Brooker, a former VP at Cirium, the aviation analytics firm.
It's a investor lineup heavy on domain expertise—the kind of syndicate that can open doors but also asks hard questions about certification timelines and enterprise sales cycles in a famously conservative industry.
The team itself is lean. Current headcount sits somewhere between two and ten employees, depending on which profile you check. Overwatch AI went through Techstarts' 2025 cohort and has been making the rounds at industry gatherings—World Aviation Festival, Aviation Festival Asia, Mobile World Congress—where Kotil and Kaeshko have demoed the platform to a rotating cast of airline IT executives.
The Productivity Pitch
According to company figures, Wingman delivers a 6.6% productivity uplift for pilots and could save airlines roughly $4 million per year. Those figures come from internal analysis, not third-party audits, so they should be read as company projections rather than validated benchmarks. Still, in an industry where even marginal efficiency gains compound across thousands of flights, the math isn't implausible.
The broader question is whether airlines—bureaucratic, risk-averse, slow to adopt new software—will embrace AI tools in the cockpit quickly enough to justify the runway Overwatch AI is now burning. Aviation is moving, cautiously, toward AI-assisted decision-making. But it's moving on aviation time, measured in certification windows and union negotiations, not Silicon Valley product cycles.
With fresh capital and strategic investors who understand that cadence, Overwatch AI is betting it can turn a technical constraint—offline operation at the edge—into a durable advantage. Whether that's enough to become table stakes for airline ops, or just a clever feature in search of a market, will likely depend on how fast the industry is willing to let AI into the cockpit.
For now, Wingman is flying. The real test is whether it can scale beyond early adopters into the kind of ubiquitous infrastructure that pilots eventually take for granted.
