Sergey Petrossov designed Aero Ventures around one specific insight: the clients who sell large private jets are usually the same clients who buy them. A family office that decides to trade its Gulfstream G550 for a G700 occupies both sides of the pre-owned market at the same time. It has an asset to sell, a replacement to source, and a five-year residual value calculation connecting both decisions to the family’s broader financial picture. According to a 2024 Airbus Corporate Jets survey of 100 large U.S. family offices averaging $3.35 billion in assets under management, 75% of them own a business aircraft outright. Ninety-three percent of those who own or lease plan to upgrade to a newer or better model within five years.
That combination produces a seller pool and a buyer pool that overlap almost entirely. The office retiring its G550 adds late-model large-cabin inventory. The same office acquiring a G700 either competes for new production slots running two years out or turns to pre-owned alternatives. The market for large-cabin and ultra-long-range aircraft, the segment where family offices are most concentrated, doesn’t have a clean separation between supply and demand.
Aero Ventures, the AI-driven pre-owned marketplace Sergey Petrossov, launched publicly on September 3, 2025, focuses specifically on aircraft valued at $10 million and above. That price threshold was a deliberate choice. It places the platform squarely within the segment where family offices transact most frequently, and where the financial and legal complexity of their ownership decisions most consistently exceeds what traditional broker relationships are built to handle.
What Makes the Family Office a Different Kind of Client
The family office isn’t simply a wealthy individual with a larger checkbook. Multi-generational usage complicates business-use documentation in ways that matter enormously for tax treatment. A Gulfstream G650 that carries the family’s founder to shareholder meetings one week and adult children to personal destinations the next has a mixed-use calculation embedded in every flight log. That calculation determines whether the asset qualifies for accelerated depreciation, and by how much.
The stakes attached to that documentation grew considerably in July 2025. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act restored 100% first-year bonus depreciation for qualified aircraft placed in service from January 2025 onward, and did so without the phase-down schedule that’d previously reduced the benefit toward zero. On a $25 million aircraft with qualifying business use, that deduction amounts to a seven-figure tax benefit in year one. Magellan Jets’ 2026 tax guide, drawing on analysis from aviation tax attorneys at Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard and Smith LLP, emphasizes that eligibility requires proper structuring, documentation, and meeting qualified property definitions. Family offices, which often fly multiple generations with different travel purposes aboard the same aircraft, carry more documentation complexity than most owner categories.
Ownership structure compounds the challenge. A family office may hold an aircraft inside an LLC, a trust, or directly, with different implications for estate planning, lien positioning, and how the aircraft registers as an asset for succession purposes. Holland and Knight’s Aviation Finance Team examined aviation finance trends across 2025 and into 2026, noting a marked increase in private jet transactions and a growing pattern of family offices optimizing how aircraft ownership and operations are structured. That pattern reflects both the bonus depreciation opportunity and a broader tendency to treat aircraft as balance sheet assets with estate planning implications rather than as operational conveniences.
Then there’s residual value. An office evaluating a trade from one large-cabin aircraft to another needs current data on what the aircraft it’s selling will actually fetch, how the replacement aircraft will hold value over a five-to-seven-year holding period, and how the economics change under different financing or charter management arrangements. That information is typically delivered through traditional broker relationships informally, over timelines measured in days, and without the ability to run multiple ownership scenarios side by side.
How the Platform Addresses These Gaps
The Aero Ventures Owner Marketplace generates real-time valuations built from comparable sales data, maintenance records, utilization rates, and market indicators. Its five-year residual value forecasting applies AI-driven predictive modeling to estimate how an aircraft’s value will track over the intended holding period. An ownership cost simulator allows prospective buyers to test different acquisition scenarios before engaging advisors.
As Corporate Jet Investor reported, Petrossov described the design intent this way: “Clients don’t necessarily want to call their broker every time they’re curious about a Challenger 350 or want to run the numbers on different ownership models. But when they can explore on their own and simulate real scenarios, it sparks ideas and builds familiarity.”
For a family office investment committee that’s evaluating its first aircraft purchase, or an existing owner considering an upgrade, that independent exploration layer is commercially relevant. The ability to model comparative economics (cash purchase against financed acquisition, standard depreciation against bonus depreciation, whole ownership against charter management) without triggering a formal advisory process reduces friction at the front end of a decision cycle that family offices approach with considerable deliberation.
The financing layer addresses a different bottleneck. Aero Ventures offers 48-hour response times on capital-backed offers, using pre-established lender relationships to move faster than aviation finance banks whose approval processes can run several weeks. Speed in capital access matters. IADA-accredited dealers completed transactions in an average of 155 days through 2025, 19% faster than the industry norm of 192. Late-model large-cabin aircraft in preferred categories frequently trade before reaching public listings. Buyers who can’t move within a compressed window lose the aircraft.
Confidentiality, Curation, and the Family Office Standard
Family offices operate under a confidentiality standard that applies across all asset classes. Ownership information, travel patterns, and transaction timing are routinely protected. An open listing model, where an aircraft for sale is publicly advertised with seller details visible, conflicts with that standard.
Aero Ventures uses a curated matching model. Buyers and sellers are qualified before any connection is made; the platform’s human advisors handle negotiation and due diligence after the AI-driven system identifies a potential match by aircraft type, budget, and timing requirements. That design protects seller confidentiality while preserving the data access needed for accurate matching.
The approach reflects a deliberate position on the role of technology relative to advisory expertise. As Sherpa Report quoted Petrossov: “We are not trying to replace the human side of aviation. We are elevating it.” For family offices, where trusted advisor relationships are embedded in how the ownership function is organized, the platform extends what an advisor can do rather than competing with the relationship itself. The technology handles preliminary qualification and scenario modeling; the advisor handles the transaction.
The Upgrade Pipeline and Why Scale Matters
The global family office sector grew from 1,285 offices in 2019 to 4,592 in 2023, with North America holding the largest share of assets under management. The Airbus Corporate Jets survey covered a slice of that market: 100 U.S. offices averaging $3.35 billion in AUM. It found 75% own an aircraft outright, 34% lease one, and 11% access aviation through fractional ownership programs. Across all three ownership categories, 93% expect to transact within five years.
The upgrade pipeline those numbers describe feeds both sides of the market continuously. Office A sells a G550 to move to a G700; the G550 enters the pre-owned pool; Office B, looking for a five-year-old large-cabin aircraft, acquires it. At the acquisition end, Office B faces the same decision process as any buyer: find a specific aircraft, assess its value against comparable transactions, secure financing, and close before the aircraft trades to another buyer. Each of those steps benefits from real-time data and fast capital access.
Petrossov’s background gives the platform a specific credibility claim with this client segment. His tenure as President of XO and Chief Growth & Digital Officer of Vista Global brought direct exposure to corporate flight departments and multi-aircraft fleet operators managing the institutional-scale equivalent of a family office’s aviation function. That experience informs the advisory layer alongside the technology tools, and it gives Aero Ventures an orientation toward the operational complexity of owning and managing aircraft, not just acquiring them.
As Sherpa Report reported Petrossov saying of the founding thesis: “By solving for the two biggest pain points, lack of information and slow delivery, we believe Aero Ventures will become the hub where the world’s most discerning aviation clients begin and manage every major ownership decision.”
Whether that’ll hold depends on how deeply the platform can penetrate a client segment that has historically purchased professional relationships alongside market access. Family offices don’t default to new platforms for high-value decisions. The Aero Ventures proposition is that the platform makes those advisors faster, more data-equipped, and more useful, without displacing them.