Lachy Groom backs Indian startup aiming to keep aircraft aloft for a year
Bengaluru-based Alteon has raised $2.5 million to build autonomous aircraft that harvest energy from ocean winds the way albatrosses do. The round was led by investor Lachy Groom.
Bengaluru startup Alteon announced Tuesday it raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed funding round led by prominent solo investor Lachy Groom, with participation from Together Fund. The company was founded in 2025 by 20-year-old Samay Sanghvi, who began working on the concept in 2023 straight out of high school, learning aircraft design by building and crashing radio-controlled models.
Alteon aims to build small, fixed-wing autonomous aircraft capable of staying airborne for more than a year using dynamic soaring, a technique albatrosses use in nature to extract energy from wind layers moving at different speeds. Unlike conventional aircraft that must carry their own fuel or battery power, Alteon's aircraft would cycle between slower and faster-moving air above the ocean to gain energy. Eventually, the company plans to use its propellers as turbines to convert some of that harvested energy into electricity to recharge onboard batteries.
The startup's initial application would be maritime surveillance, giving governments real-time visibility into activity in their waters. The planned aircraft, with roughly a three-meter wingspan, would fly close to the ocean's surface. In a recent test over the Bay of Bengal, the aircraft autonomously completed seven O-shaped cycles at speeds above 62 miles per hour while flying within one meter of the water.
Sanghvi said the next milestone is achieving "energy-neutral dynamic soaring," allowing the aircraft to fly with its propulsion off while drawing enough energy from the wind to stay aloft. Independent researchers say the underlying physics is well established, but caution that reliably extracting sufficient energy from real-world, variable wind and turbulence conditions remains a major unproven challenge that can only be resolved through further flight testing.
Alteon now employs a team of 20 in Bengaluru, operating from a 10,000-square-foot facility. The company builds four to five aircraft per week for testing and has conducted more than 200 test flights over the past month.
