In a world where traffic jams are a fact of life, Airbound, an Indian startup, has raised $37 million to make drone delivery as cost-effective as trucking. The Series A round, led by Greenoaks with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures, comes less than a year after the startup's $8.65 million seed round. All told, the three-year-old company has now raised nearly $50 million.
Airbound's pitch: drones can move certain goods faster and cheaper than road vehicles. But while there have been successful deployments, drone delivery is still far from matching the scale and versatility of trucking - a gap Airbound is trying to close by redesigning the aircraft itself.
Conventional aircraft spend a lot of energy carrying their own weight, which makes flight expensive, especially for small loads. Airbound's solution, as founder and CEO Naman Pushp puts it, is to build vertical-flight drones that weigh less than the cargo they carry. Their current drone, the TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and can carry around 2.2 pounds of payload. The next version, under development, is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds and carry up to 11 pounds.
The drones use a rocket-like, tail-sitter design: they take off and land vertically in an upright position, then transition to horizontal flight. Airbound plans to keep vertical takeoff and landing even as it develops larger aircraft, avoiding any dependence on runways. 'We want to build towards a world where everything has cost parity with trucking,' Pushp said.
Founded in 2023, Airbound has completed more than 13,000 autonomous flights across Bengaluru and Guntur. That includes over 1,000 flights with Narayana Health, where its drones transport diagnostic samples between facilities. One active drone on the Narayana route flies samples about 2.5 miles in around seven minutes - versus three to five hours by truck, when you factor in waiting for enough samples to bundle. The partnership is expanding to Narayana's new Banashankari hospital in Bengaluru, which was designed without an on-site diagnostic lab or blood bank, relying instead on Airbound's drones to connect with centralized facilities.
Looking bigger, Airbound has signed an agreement with the Andhra Pradesh state government to create a drone delivery network connecting three cities, with an eventual target of 10,000 flights a day for retail, e-commerce, and healthcare deliveries. That would require between 250 and 1,000 aircraft, depending on route lengths, though Pushp expects the number to be closer to 250. The agreement doesn't involve a government contract or subsidy, but the government is helping with the regulatory framework. Airbound expects to make money from companies using its delivery services.
Indian startups like Skye Air Mobility, TSAW Drones, and Garuda Aerospace are already exploring aerial logistics, but Pushp sees Airbound differently: they want to build the aircraft that other logistics networks could eventually use, not just become the largest delivery operator. 'That's the Boeing role - the aircraft airlines everywhere rely on, not the airline itself,' he said.
Airbound designs and manufactures its aircraft in a 43,000-square-foot facility in Bengaluru, keeping the airframe and core systems in-house. Pushp wouldn't disclose production capacity or how many aircraft they've built, but insists manufacturing won't be the bottleneck. The real bottleneck? Regulation - specifically, approvals for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, which are critical to running delivery networks at scale.
Those regulatory constraints have also kept Airbound from turning flights into meaningful commercial revenue. The startup remains broadly pre-revenue despite having over 150 employees. But Pushp is playing the long game: 'The goal is to be a giant in a few decades, not to make revenue as soon as we can.'