Building a new generation of cargo airships takes more than bold engineering. It requires managing huge volumes of technical content, protecting sensitive information, and helping teams and partners quickly find what they need. The “content challenge” is becoming more urgent as aerospace companies scale faster, work across borders, and look for practical ways to use AI without losing control of their data.
French aerospace startup FLYING WHALES is developing a transport solution for moving goods by air using dirigibles that can load and unload while hovering. The company’s mission is ambitious: help open up isolated regions, support economic development, and reduce the environmental footprint of cargo transport.
But the practical reality of such an innovative mission is, to say the least, involved. Designing aircraft, running tests, working with outside partners, and preparing for industrial scale all create a flood of documents, images, videos, and technical data. And inside all that content lies critical information.
FLYING WHALES uses Box to centralize content, support internal and external collaboration, apply security controls, and make technical knowledge easier to find.
Key takeaways:
- FLYING WHALES replaced a fragmented mix of tools with Box, giving teams one secure place to manage content, reduce version confusion, and collaborate more efficiently
- FLYING WHALES is using AI in a practical way: Starting with search, extraction, and process support to scale operations without losing control of its information
- Box Shield and native compliance features enable strict data policies, prevent unauthorized downloads of sensitive engineering files, and meet European regulatory standards like GDPR without data leaving secure boundaries
Too many tools, too little clarity
When CIO Anthony Courtois joined the company, content was spread across multiple systems. People were using Microsoft Teams and SharePoint for internal collaboration and other tools for external sharing. Internal network storage in the mix made everyday work harder than it needed to be. As Courtois says, “You end up with file copies of the same file everywhere, and you no longer know which one is the latest version.”
Box has been a game changer in transforming our data management strategy, becoming our single source of truth and optimising collaboration and efficiency across our teams.
Inconvenient, yes, but also risky. FLYING WHALES operates in a highly regulated industry, works with a large network of partners, and handles sensitive engineering information. So as the startup scaled, it had to consider the cost of storage along with content security.
At the same time, the company’s data science work was becoming more important. Vaishali Nimilan, Data Science Engineer, describes a fast-growing stream of test data, weather data, image and video content, and research material that needed to be organized before it could be used well.
Meeting strict European security standards
Operating in a highly regulated industry, FLYING WHALES must protect sensitive engineering data and 3D models while adhering to strict compliance standards like GDPR and the EU AI Act. The team must ensure that sensitive data is never exposed or moved outside secure boundaries when utilizing advanced technologies. Having a platform like Box that meets these stringent standards gives the team the absolute confidence they need to store their critical content in the cloud.
This commitment is echoed by Vaishali Nimilan, Data Science Engineer at FLYING WHALES::
"We have to be very careful with privacy and security when using AI. We need to make sure we are compliant with regulations – GDPR, the EU AI Act and so on – so when we choose new solutions, we have to be very careful how we store sensitive data within those tools. With Box AI, the data is not moving out with AI queries, which puts our team at ease.”
Four tools replaced with one
FLYING WHALES chose Box to bring content into one place and make it easier to manage, share, and secure. According to Courtois, replacing four different tools and bringing all associated content activities into a single cloud-based platform gave teams one place to work, reduced confusion around versions, and made collaboration easier across the business.
“And on the centralisation side,” Courtois says, “the fact we implemented Box means we were able to get rid of four different tools, regrouping the activity of all those tools into a single tool.”
The fact we implemented Box means we were able to get rid of four different tools, regrouping the activity of all those tools into a single tool.
FLYING WHALES now has more than 60 TB of data in Box and has tapped into various Box products to put that content to use.
Box Hubs: The company first used Box Hubs – an AI-powered content curation solution that lets organizations easily organize scattered files and folders into centralized, secure, and searchable portals – for training materials, then created a dedicated Hub for quality documents, along with other Hubs focused on aeronautics and airship-related information.
Box AI: Advanced search and information extraction, even from images and videos, gives teams the ability to ask questions across documents instead of reading through files one by one.
Box Shield: FLYING WHALES implemented a data loss prevention (DLP) policy by defining actions based on document sensitivity. For especially sensitive files, the company can prevent downloads and allow viewing only inside Box.
Box Sign: Document signatures and internal documentation are far easier, giving external partners a streamlined way to sign official contracts.
“Box has been a game changer in transforming our data management strategy,” Courtois explains, “becoming our single source of truth and optimizing collaboration and efficiency across our teams.”
A durable foundation for AI innovation
FLYING WHALES isn’t trying to automate everything at once. The goal is to remove friction from work that’s repetitive, manual, or hard to scale, starting with search, extraction, and process support. As FLYING WHALES scales, Box gives the team a way to automate processes and make better use of the large volume of test data it already stores there.
“The AI offered by Box could help us make sense of all the data we have in Box,” Courtois says.
The AI offered by Box could help us make sense of all the data we have in Box.
As FLYING WHALES moves toward the first flight of the LCA-60T in 2028, the operational stakes keep rising. More test campaigns, more partners, more regulatory documentation — and a data science team that needs clean, organized content before it can do useful work. The company is already exploring AI-driven metadata extraction to reduce the manual effort of tagging and cataloging raw data, with contract management and HR workflows next on the list.
For a startup building something that has never been built before, that kind of operational clarity is critical to making scaling possible. FLYING WHALES centralized first, applied controls, and is now using AI where it reduces real friction — not as a destination, but as a practical next step in building the infrastructure the mission requires.
