Festive rush propels Skye Air to target 300k drone shipments this October

Drone startup Skye Air expects record festive volumes, partners with Blue Dart, DTDC, Shiprocket, and Ecom Express; plans city-wise expansion to Bengaluru and beyond in 2025

Skye Air expects to deliver nearly 300,000 orders in October through drones, a threefold year-on-year jump, due to a surge in demand for online orders during the ongoing festival season, said Ankit Kumar, the chief executive officer of the drone delivery logistics startup.

 

“We are expecting this year to be better than last year, and so far it looks good. This year, there is a good amount of traction coming in from consumers, and they are buying a lot on e-commerce platforms. We expect a 50 per cent hike in the monthly volumes. So, we are expecting around 3 lakh shipments this month, up from 2 lakh shipments we usually have in a month,” Kumar said.

 

In the financial year 2025 (FY25), Skye Air did 1.2 million deliveries via drones, and in the ongoing financial year, it is targeting nearly 3.5 to 4 million drone deliveries. The company has forged partnerships with several e-commerce, horizontal, and vertical quick commerce (qcom), and logistics firms, including Blue Dart, Shiprocket, DTDC, and Ecom Express.

 

“We have another two or three clients that we are looking at starting with in the vertical qcom (quick commerce) space, in categories like fashion and beauty. Surprisingly, these two categories in vertical qcom are seeing a huge amount of growth coming in,” Kumar said.

 

The company has signed five new contracts in the past one and a half months, he said.

 

Skye Air gets around 60-65 per business from marketplaces, 20-25 per cent from aggregators and third-party logistics companies, and the remaining is split between direct-to-consumer (D2C) as well as qcom, Kumar said.

 

The company is currently serving 27 pin codes in Gurugram, two pin codes in Faridabad, and two in Ghaziabad. It is serving one pin code in Bengaluru and will activate around five pin codes in the city, just around the festive week of Diwali, he said.

 

“The idea is to have a quarterly expansion into one city. Starting next year, we will be eyeing Pune, then going to Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Kolkata. It’s not that we are going to be in the entirety of the city, but in specific locations and pin codes, which are high-demand areas for us. This quarter is reserved for Bangalore,” he said.

 

The company is in the closing stages of raising a pre-series B funding round for an undisclosed sum. The current funding round will meet the company's needs till 2027, Kumar said, adding that the formal announcement is expected around November.