Local business leaders cheer FlyExclusive’s move
Key points:
- • FlyExclusive moved its headquarters from Kinston to Raleigh’s One North Hills tower.
- • The relocation brings more than 120 workers and CEO Jim Segrave to Raleigh.
- • FlyExclusive logged nearly $376 million in revenue last year and invests heavily in AI tools.
September 2026 — A private jet company that built its business flying executives out of a small eastern North Carolina airport has moved its own headquarters to the state capital, as highlighted in a report by Axios Raleigh. Local business leaders have a new reason to cheer now that flyExclusive has relocated its corporate headquarters from Kinston to the One North Hills tower in Raleigh. The move brings more than 120 workers, including CEO Jim Segrave and the rest of senior leadership, into the Triangle.
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The company, which coordinates hundreds of flights daily across the globe and can fly up to 3,500 nautical miles on its largest jets, is keeping significant operations in Kinston, where maintenance and training staff will remain based.
The numbers behind the move are substantial for a company most North Carolinians have never heard of. FlyExclusive, founded in 2015, posted nearly $376 million in revenue last year, and its membership program for private jet access starts at $100,000. That scale helps explain why the state allocated $30 million in its budget for the Global TransPark in Kinston specifically to build out training facilities there, an investment meant to keep the town relevant to flyExclusive’s operations even as its executive functions move roughly 90 miles west.
Talent Drives Decision
CEO Jim Segrave was direct about why talent, not incentives, drove the decision. “Having access to talent locally was a big part of how we needed to grow the business,” Segrave said, according to the Axios report, adding that “technology is driving a lot of what we do today and how we innovate.”
That framing puts flyExclusive’s move in the same category as the tech and finance relocations that have defined the Triangle’s growth story over the past decade: companies chasing a labor pool built around Raleigh, Durham, and the region’s research universities rather than following tax breaks alone.
The technology Segrave referenced is not incidental to the move. FlyExclusive has made heavy investments in artificial intelligence over the past year, including real-time monitoring dashboards that track sales, fuel efficiency and maintenance data across its fleet. The company also plans to offer its internal scheduling software, called Contrails, free to other private jet operators, a move that would position flyExclusive as an infrastructure provider for the wider private aviation industry rather than just an operator competing for its own charter customers.
The relocation adds an aviation-industry data point to a broader pattern of corporate headquarters moves into the Raleigh-Durham market, which has increasingly drawn companies in sectors well outside its traditional research-triangle base of pharmaceuticals and software. Private aviation has boomed nationally since the pandemic reset expectations around business travel, and operators in that space have tended to concentrate near major coastal hubs rather than mid-sized Southeastern metros. FlyExclusive’s bet that Raleigh can supply the software, data and operations talent a modern aviation company needs is a test of whether that pattern is starting to shift.
Choice of North Hills Speaks Volumes
The choice of North Hills specifically also says something about what kind of headquarters flyExclusive is building. The mixed-use development has become one of Raleigh’s preferred addresses for companies wanting to pair office space with retail, dining and residential density nearby, an amenity-rich setting that aviation executives and the software engineers the company is recruiting can both find appealing. Locating a company built around moving high-net-worth clients quickly into a walkable, amenity-dense submarket rather than a traditional suburban office park reflects how much the talent competition, not just the client experience, is shaping where companies like flyExclusive choose to plant a flag.
The Kinston side of the arrangement is not being treated as an afterthought either. The $30 million state investment in Global TransPark training facilities signals that North Carolina’s economic development apparatus sees value in keeping flyExclusive’s technical workforce rooted in the region that helped build the company, even as its corporate identity shifts toward Raleigh. That kind of dual-hub arrangement, where a company maintains specialized operations in a smaller town while consolidating administrative and technology functions in a larger metro, has become increasingly common among fast-growing companies trying to balance workforce loyalty against talent-pool access.
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