Company: Navi AI
Co-Founders: Nikola Kostic (CEO), Vivek Velivela (CTO)
Website: https://www.flynavi.com/
About Navi AI
America’s strength in the skies has always depended on innovation, courage, and the people willing to build it. Navi helps to carry that tradition forward with AI infrastructure that turns every flight into actionable intelligence, every cockpit into a learning system, and every operation into a safer one.
Nikola Kostic and Vivek Velivela founded Navi in San Francisco in 2024 to build the future of aviation across the industry, from the flight schools training tomorrow’s pilots to commercial crews and defence forces. It’s the first purpose-built generative AI platform in commercial operation for pilot training.
Imagine a vast stream of data every aircraft generates. Navi brings together telemetry and cockpit audio with the broader pilot data ecosystem, including training materials, weather, aircraft history, sky traffic, to build a detailed, moment-by-moment debrief of each flight. Its domain-specific LLM analyzes intent, behaviour and performance – and aligns its outputs with the respective flight school’s training syllabus for the lesson or maneuver being taught.
This is the type of analysis that once took days and was reserved for accident or incident investigations now runs automatically after every flight, giving trainee pilots, flight instructors, and flight schools an ongoing view of performance and safety.
Trainees can also engage with a context-aware AI assistant, grounded in standard operating procedures, FAA regulations and flight-specific data, to ask questions, pinpoint relevant citations and surface tutorials tied to their own performance.
Navi is backed by $6.7 million funding from United Airlines Ventures, BVVC, New Vista Capital, Raptor Group, I2BF, and the U.S. Department of War.
The technology is already in use or undergoing evaluation across leading flight schools, including Sling Pilot Academy, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, University of North Dakota, Purdue University, Utah State University, Delta State University and the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base.
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