Qantas Ventures, the venture capital arm of Qantas, has invested in a US startup which has developed software to help airlines fill more seats on each flight.

Volantio announced a $US2.6 million funding round led by Ingleside Investors and strategic investors International Airlines Group, JetBlue Technology Ventures, and Qantas Ventures.

Yana, Volantio’s web-based platform, identifies flexible passengers on high demand flights, make them offers to move to lower demand flights, and automatically rebook them once they accept.

Volantio was a participant in Qantas Ventures’ first AVRO Accelerator program run by Slingshot over 12 weeks and includign up to $150,000 in investment.

The level of the current Qantas investment has’t been revealed.

“The travel industry and customer needs continue to evolve and investments in innovations like Volantio are important to ensure we keep exploring ideas, disrupting the status quo and discovering new ways of working to deliver better outcomes for our business and our customers,” says Qantas Group Executive, Strategy, Innovation and Technology Rob Marcolina.

“Volantio is a great example of the impact that investment in scale-ups can make.”

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