May 1, 2026 — Aeromuse, Inc. (Headquarters: Minato-ku, Tokyo; CEO: Masahiro Nojiri), the developer of a recruitment platform connecting pilots and airlines worldwide, today announced that it has closed a seed funding round to accelerate development of its airline recruitment platform HUD SONiC and strengthen its delivery capabilities.
The round was led by investments from Chiba Dojo Fund (Headquarters: Shibuya-ku, Tokyo) and NTT DOCOMO, INC. (Headquarters: Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo).
Background to the Funding Round and Overview of HUD SONiC
Driven by rising global travel demand and the continued expansion of LCCs, the airline industry is projected to face a shortage of approximately 80,000 airline pilots worldwide by 2032. Because training pilots requires significant time and resources, airlines around the world are increasingly reliant on mid-career hiring. However, conventional recruitment channels struggle to reach passive candidates and make it time-consuming to verify the specialized data required for pilot hiring—such as flight hours and license information—resulting in prolonged hiring cycles that have become a pressing business challenge.
At the same time, although pilots are required to record their flights in a logbook, the large number of required fields and the limited progress of digitalization mean that matching their experience against job requirements and tallying flight hours during a job search remains a manual, labor-intensive process. As a result, the entire workflow—from daily flight logging through long-term career development—has become unnecessarily complex.
To address these challenges, Aeromuse developed HUD SONiC, a platform that combines streamlined logbook recording with a recruitment database. For airlines, it offers recruitment tools that enable efficient outreach to pilots who match specific hiring criteria. For pilots, it provides a free app that simplifies logbook entries. In a pilot validation conducted in 2025, the platform attracted interest from pilots in 70 countries, with strong expectations for both more efficient airline recruitment processes and better support for pilot career development.
Going forward, Aeromuse aims to become the infrastructure supporting the careers and lifestyles of pilots around the world, while contributing to solving the talent challenges facing the aviation industry.