About us
Where aviation meets innovation
Farel builds software that helps airlines sell, operate, and grow, from first search to final close-out. Headquartered in Raleigh, live on four continents, backed by YC and leading venture firms.
- First airline live May 2023
- 3 carriers across 4 continents
- 1M+ passengers annually
Our mission
Helping people travel everywhere
Aviation runs on software built twenty years ago. Legacy PSS vendors fragment airline margin across booking, distribution, and operations, and charge enterprise prices for tools that barely work. Agents do manual reconciliation. Schedule changes don't propagate. Inventory lists go stale. Passengers find out about changes at the gate.
Farel rebuilds the stack as one system: inventory, reservations, check-in, and revenue in a single platform, API-first and IATA-native. Founded in 2020 by a team that spent the prior decade building airline distribution software, we're live with carriers across four continents, processing more than a million passengers a year.
Our values
Our core values
Four principles that shape how we build, ship, and support airlines.
Built by operators
Our team has a decade in airline software before Farel. We know what breaks at 3am during IRROPS because we've fixed it.
One system, not ten integrations
We don't ship middleware. Every capability lives in the same platform - inventory, reservations, check-in, revenue.
Standards, not lock-in
IATA-native, NDC-ready, API-first. We're built to connect, not to trap.
Airlines, not logos
We optimize for the carriers that trust us, not for press releases.
From our founder
Before Farel, I spent five years building Santufei - an online ticketing platform in Central Asia. We sold airline tickets, and the hardest parts of that business weren't on our side. They were upstream, in airline systems our team had to work around every day. I watched our ops team reconcile schedule changes by hand. I watched our support agents apologize to passengers for things our company had no control over.
After Kaspi acquired Santufei in 2019, I spent a year talking to airline people - operators, revenue managers, IT leads - about what they'd want to replace the legacy stack with. Farel is what came out of those conversations. One platform, built API-first, shipped by people who've worked in airline distribution their whole careers.
To the airlines who took a chance on us early, the team who showed up before there was a product, and the investors who saw it before most people thought change in this industry was possible - thank you.
Meet the team
The people building Farel
A flat team of operators and engineers - no layers, no middle management. We've shipped airline software for over a decade and we answer the phones ourselves.
Askhat Omarov
Founder & CEO
Previously founded Santufei (OTA, acquired by Kaspi). YC S20, Stanford GSB.
Maxim Dudin
Tech Lead
Leads platform architecture and delivery.
Askar Barinov
Operations
Runs operations, finance, and customer onboarding.
+ 15 more across engineering, design, and operations in 7 countries
Backed by
Backed by investors who believe aviation software is overdue for a rebuild
Our customers
Live with carriers across four continents
Three airlines across three continents trust Farel to run their core operations - from a first flight in the Galapagos to nationwide scale.
- First flight on Farel: May 2023
- 1M+ passengers annually
- 99.999% uptime
Where we are
Built globally, close to our customers
Headquartered in Raleigh with remote hubs across the Americas, Europe, and Central Asia. Our team lives in the time zones our airline customers operate in, so IRROPS coverage isn't a feature, it's a fact.
Showing Raleigh, NC
Careers
Join us
We're a small, flat team building software for an industry most companies are afraid to touch. If you've worked in aviation, airline distribution, or PSS integration - we want to talk to you.
Ready to take back control?
See the full platform live - tailored to your airline's operations.