Aerovy Mobility Inc.
2023 marked the beginning of Aerovy’s journey to unify energy and mobility systems. What started as an advanced air mobility startup quickly evolved into a SaaS provider for global fleets and infrastructure operators.
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated confidential information in this case study. The information in this case study is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Aerovy Mobility Inc.
My Role
Between 2023–2025, I led the design of Aerovy’s core SaaS platforms—Spectra (DER orchestration for Advanced Air Mobility), Scout (infrastructure planning for DERs to support AAM), and OEM 360 (white-label fleet platform)—from early prototyping through to international deployment.
This work spanned multi-stakeholder user research, design system creation, UX strategy, and cross-functional product leadership, ultimately enabling Aerovy’s first revenue-generating SaaS deployment.
Customer Insights & Ideation
I partnered with Aerovy’s Founder & CEO to engage airport executives and leaders in the emerging AAM infrastructure space, uncovering user needs and shaping features that supported executives, managers, and frontline operators.
Experience Strategy & Vision
I created frameworks and prototypes to articulate our vision for unified energy orchestration, enabling stakeholder alignment and investor buy-in.
Planning & Scope Definition
I worked with leadership to define the product roadmap, balancing customer goals with investor milestones, and prioritizing features for launch.
Oversight & Coordination
I designed across and collaborated with engineers, consultants, and vendors across multiple continents to ensure design intent carried through to implementation across use contexts.
Design Execution & Validation
I designed down on each of Aerovy’s three SaaS platforms Scout, Spectra, and OEM 360. I executed journeys, wireframes, high-fidelity prototypes, and a design system that scaled across dashboards, fleets, and spatial interfaces for all three platforms.
Leadership
I designed up and presented design strategy and rationale to executives, investors, and industry partners, while supporting Aerovy’s CEO with business development materials, fundraising, and global partnerships.
The Challenge
Turning aviation hype into real-world deployments
When Aerovy was founded in 2022, much of the advanced air mobility (AAM) sector was fueled by hype around electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs). Airports were interested, but sales cycles were long, capital-intensive, and often derailed by regulatory or funding delays.
The team faced a core challenge: how do you translate a futuristic vision of flying taxis into near-term products that airports, utilities, and infrastructure partners would actually adopt?
At the same time, airports are fundamentally real estate entities, not operators. Their economic priorities revolved around leasing, energy cost control, and operational efficiency—not experimental aircraft turnaround. The initial product framing around flight operations and vehicle representation risked missing the needs of their actual decision-makers.
The challenge was clear: pivot from speculative AAM futures to practical, revenue-generating electrification solutions that could scale across industries.
The Approach
From flying taxis to distributed energy orchestration
To meet this challenge, I helped lead a shift in product and design strategy.
Refocusing on DER unification
Through user research with executives, managers, and operators, we uncovered a hierarchy of needs:Executives → required granular cost/revenue reporting mapped to devices and facilities.
Managers → needed tools for leasing and building operations visibility.
Operators → focused on reducing time-to-resolution (TTR) for energy and equipment faults.
This led us to pivot away from narrow AAM predictive evaluation and scheduling systems and instead design Spectra, a scalable platform that unified distributed energy resources (DERs)—chargers, batteries, microgrids, HVAC, and more—into a single operational system.
Designing for abstract + physical contexts
I created UI systems that could flexibly represent devices in multiple ways:Abstract dashboards for executives and managers.
Spatial and location-based tracking for operators needing physical orientation of assets.
This dual representation became a core differentiator, allowing Aerovy to scale across airports, vertiports, seaports, and mobility hubs.
Building credibility through real deployments
We prioritized demonstrable wins over speculative demos. This strategy led to Aerovy’s first revenue-generating deployment in Indonesia and global partnerships in Japan, Australia, and the U.S. By the time of our $800K pre-seed raise, Aerovy had expanded partnerships across four continents, proving traction to investors and customers alike.Pivot to OEM SaaS
As Director, I led the completion of OEM 360, a white-labeled fleet management platform that allowed electric vehicle OEMs to unlock SaaS revenue streams without building internal software teams. This pivot aligned Aerovy with higher-margin, faster-moving markets, cementing our move from aviation-first to cross-industry electrification.
The Discovery
Uncovering the real needs of airports and operators
Early in Aerovy’s journey, we invested heavily in discovery alongside our CEO and early partners. We spoke with executives, operations managers, and field technicians at regional and hub airports, utilities, and infrastructure developers.
Through this work, we uncovered three tiers of user needs:
Executives: demanded financial clarity, specifically granular operating cost and revenue data tied to devices and physical spaces.
Managers: needed tools to manage complex leasing, billing, and facility operations, beyond aircraft turnaround logistics.
Operators: cared most about time-to-resolution (TTR)—reducing downtime on chargers, HVAC, and DER assets across sprawling facilities.
We also discovered a consistent theme: airports didn’t see themselves as first movers in flying taxis. They were cautious real-estate operators more motivated by efficiency and risk reduction than innovation for its own sake.
This research showed us our original focus on aircraft-centric AAM support was too narrow. Instead, the real opportunity was in distributed energy resource (DER) orchestration and data representation—solving today’s electrification pain points while building a foundation for tomorrow’s aviation.
The Vision
A scalable platform for electrification and beyond
With these insights, we set a clear vision:
Build Spectra, a platform to unify DERs—chargers, batteries, microgrids, HVAC, and more—into one scalable control system.
Design interfaces flexible enough to serve both executives (abstract dashboards, financial summaries) and operators (spatial, location-based device maps).
Position Aerovy as a cross-industry electrification platform—valuable not just for airports and vertiports, but also for seaports, mobility hubs, and electric fleet operators.
This vision led to three major outcomes:
First real-world deployments → including a revenue-generating launch in Indonesia.
Global partnerships → with airport, vertiport, and infrastructure partners across four continents (Japan, Australia, U.S., and more).
Expansion into OEM SaaS → with OEM 360, enabling electric vehicle manufacturers to offer white-labeled fleet management software and unlock SaaS revenue margins.
By reframing our work around electrification rather than speculative eVTOL operations, we created a product suite that addressed present-day customer needs while preserving relevance for the future of mobility.
The Service
From prototypes to deployed platforms
Out of our discovery and vision came three core platforms:
Spectra – An energy orchestration system that unified distributed energy resources (DERs) such as chargers, batteries, HVAC, and microgrids. Its interface supported multiple mental models:
Abstract dashboards for executives, summarizing cost, revenue, and system health.
Spatial layouts for operators, showing physical orientation of devices across facilities for faster troubleshooting and reduced time-to-resolution (TTR).
Scout – A simulation and planning tool for airports and mobility hubs to model future electrification needs. Scout helped stakeholders forecast demand, size infrastructure, and justify capital expenditures.
OEM 360 – A white-labeled fleet management platform for electric vehicle manufacturers. It allowed OEMs to monetize their vehicles with SaaS offerings, giving their customers dashboards for fleet health, utilization, billing, and charging data.
By mid-2024, Aerovy had its first revenue-generating deployment in Indonesia, with OEM 360 as the spearhead product. Meanwhile, Spectra and Scout remained strategic differentiators for airports and energy-sensitive partners across four continents.
The Framework
Designing systems that scale across industries
The complexity of these platforms demanded a robust design framework:
Multi-tiered user research → We mapped needs across executives, managers, and operators, ensuring the platforms worked at both macro (financial and regulatory) and micro (on-site operational) levels.
Flexible UI systems → I developed a design language capable of representing DERs in both abstract data dashboards and spatial, facility-oriented maps, accommodating everything from financial rollups to physical asset tracking.
Revenue-aligned insights → My research showed airports were motivated more by operational cost reduction and lease revenue visibility than by futuristic vehicle turnaround. This shifted our product framing toward DER unification and financial reporting, ensuring the platform spoke to actual business incentives.
Scalable design systems → I created component libraries and interaction patterns, ensuring consistency across Spectra, Scout, and OEM 360, and enabling faster iteration as we entered new industries like seaports and mobility hubs.
This framework allowed us to adapt Aerovy’s platforms to very different customers — from Indonesian OEMs to U.S. hub airports — without fragmenting the core design language.
The Execution
From concept to real-world deployment
My execution spanned the entire design lifecycle, from early prototypes to live deployments:
Prototyping & Iteration → Built wireframes, hi-fi mockups, and interactive prototypes to test flows with stakeholders.
Cross-functional collaboration → Worked hand-in-hand with engineering on implementation handoffs, with the CEO on investor and customer presentations, and with consultants on validating infrastructure requirements.
Scaling the team → Helped grow Aerovy’s headcount from 4 to 10, including managing a business consulting team that reported directly to me.
Strategic materials → Designed investor decks, conference presentations, and direct sales collateral that supported Aerovy’s $800K pre-seed raise and subsequent global partnerships.
Deployment & Delivery → Oversaw the design and completion of Spectra and OEM 360 through to first customer deployments, making Aerovy a revenue-generating business for the first time.
By threading design tightly with business development and engineering execution, I ensured Aerovy’s products were not just visionary but also practical, deployable, and revenue-aligned.
The Impact
From early vision to global deployments
Despite resource constraints, the design work delivered meaningful outcomes:
Successful pre-seed raise ($800K) → Investor storytelling and design collateral directly supported Aerovy’s funding at an $11M valuation, with backing from Purdue Innovates, M25, Flywheel Fund, and incubation with a top-20 VC.
Team growth → Helped scale the company from 4 to 10 members, including leading a consulting team of 12 business students who reported to me during critical phases.
Strategic partnerships across 4 continents → Supported business development with airports in the U.S., vertiport developers in Japan, energy partners in Australia, and OEM deployments in Indonesia.
Revenue generation → Brought Aerovy to its first revenue-generating deployment with OEM 360 in Indonesia, transitioning the company from R&D into active commercial operations.
Media recognition → Aerovy was featured in Business Insider, TechPoint, and M25’s investment blog as a leader in digital operations for advanced air mobility.
Reflections
Designing for real-world infrastructure
Working on Aerovy taught me that designing complex B2B SaaS systems isn’t only about the interface — it’s about understanding how financial, operational, and technical incentives overlap.
What executives want: clear financial insights and risk reduction.
What operators need: simple tools that reduce troubleshooting time.
What partners demand: extensible, white-labeled solutions that scale.
By translating these layers into flexible design systems, I was able to help Aerovy evolve from a narrow eVTOL infrastructure startup into a company with real deployments, global partnerships, and SaaS-aligned revenue potential.
The Validation
Testing in the field
Once we had functional prototypes and early deployments, validation became critical. Because Aerovy’s platforms spanned multiple user tiers — from C-suite executives to field technicians — testing required different methods at each layer:
Conferences & pilots → We used industry conferences and pilot proposals with airports to test messaging and workflows with real decision-makers. This highlighted that our early AAM-focused framing (supporting eVTOL turnaround and aircraft scheduling) was less compelling than DER unification and revenue visibility.
Operational testing → With regional airports and international partners, we validated operator-level flows: error reporting, device orientation, and system troubleshooting. These sessions emphasized the need for faster time-to-resolution (TTR) and clear spatial mapping of devices.
Revenue feedback loops → Early deployments of OEM 360 in Indonesia showed customers valued white-labeled SaaS features — billing, fleet dashboards, and utilization reporting — as direct business enablers. This validated the pivot from aviation-exclusive software to a broader OEM-first strategy.
We also discovered pain points that forced iteration:
Operators struggled with data overload → led to granular filtering and summarized reporting.
Executives cared about lease revenue and operating costs, not technical DER details → led to tiered views with financial rollups.
Partners demanded extensibility across industries → pushed us to abstract the design language so it could scale from airports to seaports, mobility hubs, and beyond.