As venture investors, most of the investment cases that we consider lucrative are about superiority in either the product, the team, or the market. Usually, startups develop a vastly superior product, for a market that is clear and proven. Sometimes, the founder team has a background that places them uniquely as the right people to build or scale a solution. And sometimes, the addressable market is growing at 10% or 15% per year, and you place a bet on someone who can seize a large chunk of it before everybody else.
But it rarely happens that all three hypotheses check out in one single investment. Such is the story of the Sofia company Fly The Earth, and the team led by paragliders Veso Ovcharov and Petar Siarow.
Veso Ovcharov is a name that doesn’t need much of an introduction. A skier since he was three years old, he became an accomplished freestyle snowboarder and graduated the National Sports Academy in Bulgaria with honors, followed by a career of pioneering firsts in acrobatic paragliding and competitive skydiving. Veso’s achievements include being the first Bulgarian paraglider to master infinity tumbling maneuvers, and in 2015 he was part of a team that broke the world record in this category, with 126 synchronized tumbles with two other pilots.
At home in Bulgaria, Veso has always been a champion of popularizing responsible extreme sports activities, introducing people to paragliding and teaching them how to master the sport safely and responsibly. One of the people who got introduced to the sport via Veso, starting some 15 years ago, was Sofia lawyer Petar Siarow. The two quickly bonded, and Petar joined Veso as a business partner for the commercial part of Veso’s work as a professional athlete.
Veso and Petar’s journey into paragliding is exemplary of an overall, worldwide trend that has taken shape over the last 25 years. “In 1999, when I first tried paragliding, there were about 10 people in Bulgaria doing it”, says Veso. “And recreational flying, so-called tandem flying, where a professional pilot controls the paraglider and a passenger is strapped on purely for the thrill and experience, did not exist. Today, we have 20,000 tandem flights each year in Bulgaria, up from literally 0 twenty-five years ago”.
This is the exciting market aspect of Fly The Earth: paragliding has been growing at an average 15% per year for the last 15 years. Currently valued at $111 million worldwide, this market is expected to grow by at least 10% per year until 2033, when it will reach $281 million in value. Paragliding equipment consists of two major parts: the wing, and the harness. According to Veso and Petar, there are many good wings out there, but when it comes to harnesses, the “seat” on which the pilot sits, the founders say the situation is different.
“About six years ago we got this insight; why are harnesses so rudimentary? If you compare it to the automotive world, harnesses were something like Dacia cars; basic, got the job done without any frills and with little comfort. If you wanted more versatility or enhanced safety, you needed to hand-build your own, or manually upgrade an existing model, with all the risks involved”, says Petar.
And so in 2018, Fly The Earth took off, with the aim of designing the best possible paragliding harness in the premium segment. In 2020, the first prototype was tested by ace pilots on the Canary Islands, and by 2021, Veso and Petar registered the company and rented a workshop space in a residential Sofia suburb where the 3RS harness, the brand’s first flagship product, has entered serial production. With an enhanced carbon seat plate, and an innovative system for rapid deployment of all three rescue parachutes, it’s the Mercedes Benz of paragliding harnesses, a far cry from most of the “Dacia” models out there on the market.
As the company gets ready to deliver 250-300 harnesses this year, Veso and Petar are working hard on developing more products, all part of a much bigger vision for high-quality, well-designed, sustainable, and comfortable activewear and sports equipment products. “The thing that fascinates me most”, says Veso, “is that only 20 years ago, people spent 95% of their time moving outdoors either for work or for family matters (like shopping, holidays, or picking up kids from school). Today, 30% of our outdoor movements are related to sports. It’s a huge increase, and symbolizes a fundamental shift for the kind of clothing and gear that we need when we’re out and about. With Fly The Earth, our long goal is to design, develop, and deliver the various multifunctional suits and attributes that will make active outdoor life safe, comfortable, and enjoyable.”