Flykitt

Cabin lights / 35,000 feet

It's hour nine of a red-eye, and one passenger isn't suffering

Somewhere over the Atlantic, the cabin has gone dark and most of the plane has surrendered. People are folded into seats at angles the human spine was not designed for. One traveler, though, is calm. Amber glasses on. A small packet of supplements already half-spent. A phone buzzing with a notification that reads, more or less, "sleep now." When the plane lands at 6 a.m. local time, that person will walk into a meeting and act like they slept in their own bed. That is the entire pitch of Flykitt, and it is a strangely literal one.

Flykitt is the consumer product from Fount, a Los Angeles human-performance company. The kit bundles three unglamorous things - timed supplements, blue-light-blocking glasses, and an app - into one coordinated protocol that aims to delete jet lag rather than merely complain about it. The company sells it directly to travelers and, increasingly, to the kind of organizations that measure performance for a living.

The problem they saw

Everyone accepted that flying wrecks you. Flykitt refused.

For decades the standard advice on jet lag has been a shrug dressed up as wisdom: hydrate, avoid coffee, get sunlight, suffer for a few days. The travel industry treated arriving exhausted as a tax you simply paid for crossing time zones. It was, conveniently, a problem nobody was responsible for solving.

Flykitt's founding insight is that jet lag is not one problem but two, stacked. The first is the obvious one - your internal clock is stuck in the time zone you left. The second is quieter: long flights are a physiological assault. Pressurized cabins, dry air, immobility, and poor fueling produce real inflammation in the body. Treat only the clock and you still land feeling like you have a low-grade flu. Treat both, the company argues, and the misery mostly disappears.

It is a tidy reframing, and like most tidy reframings it is slightly annoying once you hear it, because it makes the old advice sound like it was treating a symptom and ignoring the patient.

The founders' bet

A Pentagon scientist who optimized SEALs, then aimed lower - at your carry-on

Andrew Herr did not arrive at jet lag through the wellness aisle. He spent years leading human-performance efforts for the U.S. military, work that earned him the U.S. Army's "Mad Scientist" honor - twice, which suggests either consistency or stubbornness. His academic background reads like a deliberately unusual stack: Georgetown graduate degrees spanning health physics, microbiology and immunology, and national-security policy.

The bet behind Fount was that the same playbook used to keep special operators and fighter pilots functional under brutal conditions could be packaged for civilians. Travel was the obvious wedge. Long-haul flights are a universal, repeatable, measurable stressor - which is to say, a perfect place to prove that human performance can be engineered rather than endured. Herr founded Fount around 2020 and launched Flykitt in November 2022.

The product

Three boring things, one bossy app

Flykitt's cleverness is not in any single component. It is in the choreography. You enter your flight details and some honest answers about your sleep, and the app builds a minute-by-minute plan: when to take each supplement, when to put the glasses on, when to eat, and when to sleep. The traveler's only job is to obey the notifications.

The packaging even got a redesign with a lighter color palette - specifically so you can tell the caps apart on a dark overnight flight. It is the kind of small, unromantic detail that tends to mark a product built by people who actually use it.

The proof

The numbers do a lot of the talking

A jet lag claim is easy to make and hard to live up to, because every traveler is a skeptic by 4 a.m. Flykitt leans on its own reported figures: the large majority of users say they experience minimal to no jet lag, with the company citing numbers in the 93-95% range across its materials. The glasses block roughly 99% of disruptive blue light. The supplement schedule is tuned to your exact flight, not a generic time zone count.

Beyond self-reported stats, the credibility comes from who reaches for it. The product traces back to research with Navy SEALs and fighter pilots, and the customer list now reportedly includes pro sports teams, Olympians, and the sort of executives whose calendars do not forgive a lost day. In 2023, investors agreed the thesis had legs: a $12M Series A, led by Amity Ventures with Not Boring Capital and others alongside.

The mission

Make elite human performance feel ordinary

Flykitt is the wedge, not the whole plan. Fount's larger ambition is to take the kind of personalized, evidence-driven performance work once reserved for operators and athletes and make it available to people whose only qualification is a boarding pass. Travel is simply the most universal proving ground - everyone flies, everyone arrives wrecked, and almost everyone had quietly assumed nothing could be done about it.

The company's stance is refreshingly unsentimental about wellness. There is no talk of vibes or balance. There is a flight, a body, a set of measurable stressors, and a protocol designed to counter each one on schedule. It treats your physiology as something you can plan around rather than apologize to.

Why it matters tomorrow

Back to that dark cabin, nine hours in

Return to the red-eye. The plane is still folded into uncomfortable shapes, the same as it has been on every overnight flight in the history of commercial aviation. What's changed is that the misery is no longer mandatory. The traveler in the amber glasses isn't lucky or genetically gifted. They just ran a protocol.

That is the quietly radical thing about Flykitt. It takes one of travel's most universal complaints - the kind everyone grumbles about and nobody questions - and reclassifies it from "the cost of flying" to "a solvable problem with a checklist." If the company is right, the future of long-haul travel is less about endurance and more about preparation. The plane lands at 6 a.m. The traveler walks off and gets to work. The jet lag, for once, stayed home.