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Highlights

How i6 Group Landed British Airways by Returning “To the Day” Six Months Later

When Alex Mattos and his co-founder Steve met in the defense aerospace electronics business, they stumbled into an unexpected insight. Steve’s company had been acquired, and Alex was sent to integrate the engineering team. The acquired business worked in fuel system testing for military applications.

Their initial plan—commercializing defense technology for commercial aviation—failed completely. But the failure revealed something more valuable: the aviation fuel industry was running on 1980s technology while managing billions in transactions daily. “There was a lot of people driving paper around, there was a lot of re keying of information,” Alex recalls. “There was no real time capability.”

In a recent episode of BUILDERS, Alex shared how i6 Group navigated the challenge of digitizing aviation fuel operations across multiple stakeholders—airlines, fuel suppliers, and service providers—ultimately scaling to 260+ airports globally without traditional sales motions.

The Multi-Party Coordination Problem

Aviation fuel isn’t a simple buyer-seller transaction. “There are multiple parties in fueling airlines of course, the fuel suppliers who are making the fuel, the service providers that deliver it, and the storage and logistics chain that gets it from A to B,” Alex explains. “It’s almost a just in time supply chain at a lot of the airports, especially the big ones.”

Each party operates disconnected systems. Airlines need real-time data for flight ops decisions. Fuel suppliers need accurate reconciliation across thousands of transactions. Service providers need coordination during weather disruptions or aircraft delays. The paper-based process created friction at every handoff.

i6’s insight: the value wasn’t in digitizing one workflow—it was in becoming the connective tissue between all parties. “We’re more than a handheld. We’re not just one piece of mobile technology in an app. This is about connecting a whole industry together.”

Strategic Customer Selection Based on Cultural Risk Tolerance

Landing enterprise customers pre-product-market fit requires understanding organizational psychology, not just technical fit. Most founders chase logos or budget size. Alex targeted cultural willingness to partner with startups.

“We approached Virgin on the basis that they have a reputation, or Richard Branson has a reputation for being entrepreneurial, taking a risk, doing something different. So we approached them and they said, yeah, that’s great, you can do a trial on our planes.”

Virgin Atlantic became i6’s first operational deployment without payment. “They didn’t pay for it. We had to find the money for that. But once we’ve done that, they also are very good about helping and enabling us to demonstrate that technology to the bigger boys.”

This was capital allocation strategy disguised as customer acquisition. The Virgin reference became the credential that British Airways—a far more conservative buyer—would trust.

Treating Conditional Objections as Calendar Commitments

When i6 approached British Airways with their Virgin results, the fuel manager was skeptical. “I think they said, we’ve tried this and this didn’t work so well, but, you know, if you’re still here in six months, come back.”

Most founders interpret “come back later” as soft rejection. Alex heard a specific performance contract: survive six months, return with proof, earn reconsideration.

“So to the day we came back, you know, we’re still here and we’ve done this trial with Virgin and here’s the results, and it went really well.”

This wasn’t just persistence—it was demonstrating the execution precision that risk-averse enterprises require. In aviation, where operational reliability determines safety outcomes, showing you track commitments to the day signals you understand their standards.

British Airways ran their procurement process. Then market timing aligned. “Conveniently, at that point, though, another player sort of in this market left the industry. They decided to liquidate, which meant there was some holes.”

i6 won Heathrow—one of the world’s highest-volume airports. But the more significant win was what happened next.

Engineering Network Effects in Concentrated Markets

Four months after Heathrow went live, Dubai airport reached out unsolicited. “We were approached by one of our customers at Dubai. They weren’t a customer at the time, but we’ve heard great things. We’d like to learn more.”

No outbound. No marketing spend. Just operational excellence creating its own demand signal in a small, interconnected industry.

Alex describes aviation fuel as “a massive global industry” that’s “surprisingly small” in terms of community density. Everyone knows everyone. Deployments at major hubs become case studies that travel through informal networks faster than any sales team could move.

This fundamentally changed i6’s GTM strategy. In concentrated B2B markets, customer success investment compounds faster than sales headcount. Your first ten customers are your most important sales asset—not because of logos, but because exceptional execution becomes self-propagating in tight communities.

The strategic implication: over-index on operational excellence at early deployments rather than spreading thin across many prospects. Let the network do the selling.

Segmenting by Operational Architecture, Not Surface Demographics

Geographic expansion revealed that market segmentation required understanding structural differences in how airlines operate—differences invisible from outside the industry.

European airlines optimize for efficiency at the transaction level. “They’re very focused on how much fuel they’re using. How can they be more efficient in that, how can they get more data about the decisions that are being made?”

US airlines face a different problem entirely. “The US airlines took control in the late 80s of the fuel supply network in the US and so more accurately buy on the open market. They deal with the logistics, but they buy in huge quantities. So for them it’s more about data accuracy reconciliation.”

Same product category. Different jobs-to-be-done driven by ownership models that diverged forty years ago. European airlines needed decision-support tools for optimization. US airlines needed supply chain visibility across distributed inventory.

This wasn’t a feature prioritization problem—it required different positioning frameworks, different stakeholder engagement strategies, and different success metrics for each segment. The lesson for founders: don’t assume global enterprises have unified needs. Segment by operational model and regulatory environment, then customize the entire GTM motion accordingly.

Navigating Multi-Stakeholder Enterprise Sales

Selling aviation infrastructure means coordinating buy-in across organizational silos with competing priorities. “An airline itself, of course, there are many different departments. There’s the fuel team that is interested in fuel…But there’s also flight ops, there’s the pilot community that may or may not have union discussions to be had, and ultimately a CFO that’s got to sign off on the cost.”

Fuel represents 30-35% of airline operating costs, making any fuel-related technology a strategic decision requiring C-level approval. But the economic buyer (CFO) isn’t the user (fuel teams, pilots, service providers). Each stakeholder evaluates different dimensions: cost reduction, operational safety, workflow efficiency, compliance risk.

Alex’s approach: “You can’t just sell our services directly to an airline. The maximum benefit comes where our products are on the ground for the interplane.” Success required coordinating value across the entire ecosystem—not just winning one internal champion.

His advice strips away the complexity: “It’s about having a product that works. A good product sells itself. If you can find the right people and you can navigate that stakeholder spider’s web.”

Staging Capital Sources to Match Capability Gaps

i6’s funding strategy demonstrates sophisticated thinking about investor selection as capability acquisition, not just capital raising.

Series A brought strategic investors who were actual platform participants: British Airways, JetBlue, Shell, and World Fuel Services. “We needed the strategic input we needed to ensure that the products were going to be properly usable in the market.” These weren’t passive financial investors—they were design partners, reference customers, and network access in one package.

Series B required operational scaling expertise. “Series B was really at that point that sort of says, right, we’re ready now, we’ve got the product, we’ve got the critical mass. Now what we need to do is really scale this.” They brought in German PE firm Itrium, focused on “building and growing our sales and revenue teams” and operational infrastructure.

The deliberate staging: validate product-market fit with strategics who have domain expertise and customer access, then scale with financial investors who’ve operationalized growth playbooks across multiple companies.

Most founders optimize fundraising on valuation or dilution. Alex optimized on matching investor capability to the company’s current bottleneck. Series A solved product validation. Series B solved operational scaling. Each round brought exactly the expertise gap that would have otherwise slowed growth.

Building Self-Sustainability as Exit Strategy

i6 now operates at 260+ airports serving airlines like British Airways, Delta, and Virgin Atlantic. But Alex’s focus isn’t raising Series C—it’s reaching profitability.

“To be perfectly honest, I hope we can avoid doing a Series C. So I’m very keen that we build and establish a fully self sustaining business…we should get to a place where the business becomes fully sustainable in the next couple of years.”

This creates strategic optionality at exit. “Then we’ll be thinking about, well what is next? Are we thinking ipo? Are we thinking some kind of MA or acquisition sort of approach? I think both options are there.”

Reaching profitability eliminates the forced march toward subsequent rounds. It lets you choose exit timing and mechanism based on market conditions and strategic fit, not cash position. For infrastructure businesses with long implementation cycles, this fundamentally changes negotiating leverage.

The lesson isn’t about being capital-efficient for its own sake—it’s about controlling your timeline. Investors with capital scarcity must take available exits. Profitable companies can wait for optimal exits. That difference compounds into vastly different outcomes.