India's Airbound raises $37M to make drone delivery compete with trucking
Indian drone startup Airbound has raised $37 million in a Series A round to develop vertical-takeoff drones designed to undercut truck transport costs. The three-year-old company has now raised nearly $50 million total.
Airbound, a three-year-old Indian startup building autonomous delivery drones, has closed a $37 million Series A funding round led by Greenoaks, with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures. The round arrives less than a year after the company's $8.65 million seed round, bringing its total funding to nearly $50 million.
CEO and founder Naman Pushp explained that conventional aircraft waste much of their energy carrying their own weight rather than cargo, which makes flying small loads expensive. Airbound's approach is to build vertical-flight drones engineered to weigh less than the payload they carry. Its current drone, TRT, weighs about 3.3 pounds and carries roughly 2.2 pounds of cargo. A larger version in development is expected to weigh about 6.6 pounds while carrying up to 11 pounds. The drones use a rocket-like, tail-sitter design that takes off and lands vertically before switching to horizontal flight, a feature Pushp said the company intends to keep even in larger models to avoid depending on runways.
The startup has carried out more than 13,000 autonomous flights in the southern Indian cities of Bengaluru and Guntur, including over 1,000 flights transporting diagnostic samples for hospital network Narayana Health. On that route, a single drone flies samples about 2.5 miles in around seven minutes, compared with three to five hours by truck once wait times for bundling samples are included. The partnership is expanding to a new Narayana hospital in Bengaluru that was built without its own diagnostic lab.
Airbound has also signed an agreement with the government of Andhra Pradesh to build a drone delivery network connecting three cities, targeting 10,000 flights per day for retail, e-commerce, and healthcare use, which would require between 250 and 1,000 aircraft. The deal does not include government funding or a contract; the state is instead helping develop the regulatory framework. Pushp said Airbound aims to supply aircraft to other logistics operators rather than become the biggest delivery company itself, comparing the strategy to Boeing's role in aviation. Despite employing more than 150 people, Airbound remains largely pre-revenue, with regulatory approval for beyond-visual-line-of-sight flights cited as the main bottleneck to scaling.
